Credit

Karl Rabe/Vassar College

Mita Choudhury, Professor of History on the Evalyn Clark Chair, was selected by the Faculty in the School of Historical Studies for membership at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) during the 2025–26 academic year. IAS faculty from each school selects scholars with “the expectation that each Member’s period of residence at the Institute will result in work of significance and originality.”

During her fellowship term, Mita will be completing her book project The Silent Chain: History and Reckoning in the Catholic Church, which focuses on the early modern French Church and centers sexual assault victims as relevant historical figures. The Silent Chain revisits her microhistory The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint (2015), in which she examined a notorious 1731 scandal involving 21-year-old Catherine Cadière who accused her Jesuit confessor of seduction and heresy. The Wanton Jesuit argued the affair was an historical watershed that created new possibilities for political dissent, but it mimicked archival sources that spotlight clerics and ignore victims’ experiences.

The Silent Chain reconsiders the Cadière affair, including questions about crime and credibility within a world where violence could be mundane. It challenges the traditional monograph and, instead, adopts a hybrid structure that fuses together microhistory, metahistory, and memoir in each chapter. Mita’s project interrogates the processes and ethics of historical recuperation, methodology, and positionality as it closely examines her denial of Cadière’s violation within the complex hierarchies of academia. In doing so, this project examines how historians as well as historical actors render these victims invisible.

Mita is currently a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) where she is completing the initial work on her project in a cohort of global scholars from diverse fields.