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Dr Linda Zampol D’Ortia

Gender and Women’s History Research Centre

Areas of expertise: early modern Jesuit missions, history of emotions and feelings, religion and the senses, Orientalism and Asian religions

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5640-6988

Email: Linda.ZampolDortia@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

Linda Zampol D’Ortia is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). She holds a BA in Japanese studies (Ca’Foscari) and a MA in Religious Studies with a focus on Asian religions (University of Padua). She obtained her Ph.D. in Religion and History from the University of Otago in 2017, with a dissertation titled “The Cape of the Devil: Salvation in the Japanese Jesuit Mission Under Francisco Cabral (1570–1579).”

Linda’s interests include early modern Catholic missions, intercultural contacts, religious dress, encounters between Christianity and Asian religions, and missionary failure. Her current project, “Emotions as Practice in the early modern Jesuit missions in the Asia-Pacific” (EMOPractices), approaches the XVI-XVIII-century Asian enterprises of the Society of Jesus through the lens of emotions. By analyzing manuscript letters from six early modern Jesuit missions, it aims to reveal the previously disregarded role of Jesuit emotional practices and their impact on the creation of stereotypes of peoples of the Asia-Pacific region. Her project includes a focus on the construction of Jesuit masculinities and the gendered regulations of the mission’s emotional communities, and if and how they differed from both European Catholic and Asian ones; and an analysis of the presence and role of women in the Japanese mission.

In the past, she has held research fellowships at the National Library of Australia, at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe” (CERES) of Ruhr University in Bochum, and at Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. She has also collaborated in the project “Interactions Between Rivals: The Christian Mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan” at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) of the New University of Lisbon, helping to create a database of sources on the contacts between Catholic missionaries and Japanese Buddhist monks.