Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens

Fitzpatrick Behrens, assistant professor of history at California State University, Northridge, will be a visiting fellow at Kellogg throughout the 2005–06 academic year. During that time, she will work on a project entitled “Transforming Mission: Maryknoll Catholic Missionaries, Indigenous Catechists and Liberation Theology in Peru & Guatemala, 1943–2000.” Her research will address issues in the sociology of religion and culture by juxtaposing the Maryknollers’ accounts of what they were doing and the indigenous peoples’ accounts of their interactions with the Maryknollers.

In addition to organized civil society and religion in the Americas, Fitzpatrick Behrens is interested in gender and sexuality in the Americas, militarism in Latin America, Latin America/US relations, contemporary Latin American history and 19th- and 20th-century Central America and Peru. She taught at University of California, San Diego, and was a post-doctoral Rockefeller fellow at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She earned a PhD in history and an MA in contemporary Latin American history at the University of California, San Diego. Fitzpatrick Behrens will teach history courses while at Notre Dame.