Dr Lucia Pozzi

MA, PhD (Bologna)

Lucia Pozzi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017-2020) in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Her PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Claude Langlois, EPHE of Sorbonne University (France), was focused on the history of a papal statement, which for the first time in XX Century dealt with reproductive rights and bioethics and played a fundamental role in shaping Italian ideas about conjugal sexuality and gender roles. Between 2008 and 2012 she was doctoral fellow of the Fondazione per le Science religiose in Bologna. In 2014 she won a grant of Friends of University of Wisconsin Madison Libraries (USA).

Her postdoctoral project intends to investigate how the Catholic Church modified and adapted itself to scientific modernity, through an exploration of its encounter with nineteenth-century and twentieth-century medicine. Proceeding from the analysis of female sexuality in Catholic thinking, it focuses on the entanglement between religion and science and between modernity and scientific development. Her study thus bridges long-standing strengths of IASH, that is the research in the history of sexuality, and its new focus on relations between science and religion, the topic of Prof. Peter Harrison’s ARC Laureate Project on Science and Secularization.