Amy Hollywood is Department of Religious Studies Lester Lecturer for 2009
In September 2009, the Department sponsored , the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard University Divinity School, as its 2009 Lester Lecturer. Hollywood is a historian of Christian thought specializing in mysticism, with strong interests in feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), which received the International Congress of Medieval Studies' Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies, and Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and is currently co-editing the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism and completing a book of essays to be called "Acute Melancholia." Dr. Hollywood's talk, “Love and the Heretic,” addressed issues of love, death and desire in Christian mysticism through the interweaving of medieval women’s and men’s mystical texts and her own reflections on love, politics, and the study of religion. Both the lecture and a discussion with Dr. Hollywood on the category of 'ritual' in the academic study of religion the following day were well attended.