Jesse L. Rosenberger Work-In-Progress Seminar Series: The Ones They Carried: Reimagining Communities of Care in Salvador, 1840-1920: Molly Ball

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Molly Ball

Assistant Professor of History

PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013

Molly Ball is an economic and social historian of modern Brazil and of immigration history. Her research explores everyday experiences and choices from working-class individuals and families. She brings social and economic history into concert to examine both how people adapted to economic constraints and opportunities and how, when considered collectively, these singular decisions affected larger trends. 

Her current research project, “Moving Past GDP: Quality of Life as a Woman’s Measure,” embraces feminist economic history. She explores how neonatal birth outcomes in Latin America can provide insight women’s changing standards-of-living in the 20th century. This project addresses data constraints that often limit historic measurement of Latin American standards of living.

She actively incorporates digital humanities, community-engaged coursework, and public history into her teaching to foster a dynamic and welcoming learning environment. She also serves as the coordinator of the Latin American Studies minor.

d Renaissance Europe, centering around two major themes: astrology and apocalyptic prophecy, and saints and miracles. My first book, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350-1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), explores a French cardinal’s use of astrology to investigate the time of the world’s End. She argues that d’Ailly, worried about intractable papal Schism and hoping that a church council could bring the crisis to an end, turned to astrology as a way to silence the numerous forces that saw the Great Schism as a preamble to Antichrist’s reign and thus, by implication, incapable of resolution by human efforts. In 2014, I published a second monograph: The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 La corónica International Book Award. Here I study the canonization and cult of the Valencian friar Vincent Ferrer, a fiery apocalyptic preacher of the Schism years who died in 1419 and was canonized in 1455, tracing the various meanings of the saint from the moment of his death in Brittany to his appropriation by Dominican friars in Spain’s New World colonies.

More recently, she has returned to the interrelationships between astrology and prophecy in a new book project, tentatively titled “Astrology and the Sibyls,” an investigation of ways of knowing the future ranging from around 1100 to around 1600, research supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2022-23. In addition, I have been exploring the connections between sanctity, mendicant reform, and tales of the demonic in a series of papers, articles, and book chapters focusing on the cults of Vincent Ferrer and Bernardino of Siena.