Mita Choudhury

I am currently working on a book-length project examines sexual violence in the early modern French Church. Centering recent Black feminist scholarship, its analysis challenges traditional church histories by foregrounding sexual violence, trauma, subjectivity, and silence found in 17th- and 18-century court records from French archives. I interrogate why and how both historical actors and historians, including myself, have contributed to this silence surrounding assault. Fusing microhistory, metahistory, and memoir, I seek to rethink the traditional historical monograph by combining established narratives of archived-based history writing with the “personal turn.” Through the incorporation of multidisciplinary methodologies—memoir writing, religious studies, and trauma studies, I show how the visibility of personal stakes may lead to new forms of history.