Cassandra Painter

Lecturer in Humanities

Linwood House 114
219-464-5367
cassandra.painter@valpo.edu

Cassandra Painter is a religious and cultural historian of modern Germany. She earned her BA in History, summa cum laude, from the College of Idaho in 2010, her MA from the University of Rochester in 2012, and will receive her PhD from Vanderbilt University in August 2018. In 2016-2017, she was a Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. Her research, which has been supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship as well as Fulbright Scholarship, focuses on lived religion in the modern world, in the uses of culture to express identity, and the ways in which faith traditions evolve and adapt over time and space. Her dissertation examines the life and subsequent cult of veneration of stigmatic and visionary Anna Katharina Emmerick (1774-1824), using her as a recurring touchstone in an examination of how German Catholics created meaning and built community in modern Germany; who was able to participate in this process; and how Catholics’ understanding of themselves, their faith and their place in Germany evolved over time.