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Religion, philosophy, and literary criticism will all be explored by Paul Cefalu, associate professor of English, during the Jones Faculty Lecture held April 10 at 7:30 p.m. in room 104 Kirby Hall.
The lecture, entitled “The Doubting Disease: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Religious Scrupulosity,” looks at the connection between OCD and scrupulosity through recent psychological and theological accounts. Cefalu focuses on the widely-held belief that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians, including Martin Luther, Ignatius Loyola, and John Bunyan, suffered from pathological forms of religious scrupulosity.
“OCD has been covered extensively by the media of late, and so it seemed like a timely and interesting topic to research,” says Cefalu. “Nearly all the published books on OCD are self-help books written by psychiatrists and psychotherapists. We currently do not have a book that offers a comprehensive historical and cultural survey of obsessions and compulsions.”
Cefalu hopes to remedy that situation. He plans for Monday’s lecture to become part of the first chapter of a projected book provisionally entitled Obsessions and Compulsions: A Cultural History.
Cefalu joined the Lafayette faculty in 1999 after receiving his Ph.D. from University of Chicago. He graduated with honors in English from Johns Hopkins University. He is a recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellowship and a fellowship and teaching prize from University of Chicago.
He has recently published Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press) and Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts (Palgrave Macmillan Press). His latest project, a book manuscript titled Sublime Objects of Theology: Contemporary Theory and Early Modern English Literature, is under review by Palgrave Macmillan Press.
The Jones Faculty Lecture is one of two sponsored this school year by the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture and Awards Fund, established in 1966 to recognize superior teaching and scholarship at Lafayette.