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Selected Works of John Courtney Murray, S.J.

This collection contains a near comprehensive bibliography of the published and unpublished works of John Courtney Murray, S.J. One of the premier Catholic political theorists and theologians of the 20th century, Murray is perhaps best known for his contributions during Vatican II, serving as a key shaper of the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. This collection includes material that has long been out of print, as well as copies of speeches and talks found only in the John Courtney Murray Papers, housed within the archives of the Woodstock Theological Library.

Image: Detail from page of The Declaration on Religious Freedom, 1966

Georgetown College Financial Records

This collection contains volumes detailing the business affairs of Georgetown College in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Included are ledgers, journals, day books, cash books, and expense books.

As the College managed the money brought by or sent to individual students for much of this time, the run of ledgers in this collection (denoted by the I.A.1 designation) provide detailed information about the expenses of an education at Georgetown, documenting not only tuition and room and board expenses but also charges for items such as required text books, haircuts, etc. Other volumes document the College's expenses for food, clothing, household items, and services.

Entries scattered throughout pre-1863 volumes document the participation of the College in slavery and record expenses for slave provisions such as clothing and medicine, and wages paid for the employment of enslaved laborers and servants hired out by their owners.

The Georgetown College Financial Records comprise over 200 volumes, all of which will be digitized and added to this collection over time.

Image: Detail of Georgetown College Financial Ledger

Fall ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) 

The DigitalGeorgetown Institutional Repository is a service of the Georgetown University Library that preserves and makes available scholarly research by Georgetown's faculty, staff, and students. The open access repository includes conference papers, images, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, technical reports, theses and dissertations, working papers, and more.

Image: Falll ETD Featured Image"

Featured Scholarly Publications

Eating as a Self-Shaping Activity

My dissertation offers a new account of eating as a self-shaping activity. I argue that the ways we understand and practice eating shape our agency, affects, capacities, values, temporality, and other important aspects of the self. Moreover, eating can shape the self in good or bad ways. To develop this account, I analyze and critique the view that good eating is healthy eating, and good eaters eat for health above all else. I contend that current bioethical critiques of such ‘healthism’ do not account for the self-shaping effects of eating and so lack a complete analysis of healthism’s ethical import. Through an extended critique of diet research on eating disorders and vegetarianism, I also show how understanding eating as a self-shaping activity helps us make ethically-informed choices about how to understand and characterize eating. This work draws attention to overlooked aspects of the ethical importance of eating, and develops conceptual tools for analyzing the effects of eating on the self that can be deployed in a variety of contexts including food ethics, clinical ethics, diet research, and public conversations about eating.

Reading Revision: The Archival Imagination in Marianne Moore's Early Poems

In order to better understand Marianne Moore’s revision practices, my thesis examines Moore’s copies of Poems and Observations, which are currently held in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, as well as the unpublished and published revisions of three poems that have some of the most protracted revision histories: “Poetry,” “When I Buy Pictures,” and “A Grave.” Moore made myriad revisions to both of these texts and poems, from radical omissions and minor substitutions, to corrections of spelling and textual errors. Some of these revisions ultimately become variants in her many published versions of the poems, while others are like ghosts, never appearing in publication. My thesis traces the changes that took place between each draft and typed manuscript of these three poems. While it is both difficult to locate these revisions within a timeline, Moore’s archive nonetheless facilitates an authoritative reading of these revisions. Moore’s revisions can be understood both as a practice and a theme in her work, enabling readers to resist narratives of textual and compositional closure and concision. Finally, Moore’s revisionary practice and archival habit informs the contemporary experience of the public-facing writer on digital sites of composition, curation, and archiving..