Bio

Jacob Saliba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Boston College specializing in modern European intellectual history. He holds an MA in political science from Boston College and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Ohio Dominican University. Saliba’s dissertation project explains how and why a set of Catholic, Jewish, and secular intellectuals successfully built mutual intellectual projects and created sustainable civic bonds during the social-political tumult of interwar France. Drawing on archival evidence together with published texts, it demonstrates that the period’s looming context of fascism, racism, and extremism produced new conditions of possibility for religious and democratic renewal that occurred amidst these very tensions, providing empirically rich context to re-evaluate religion as a force for shaping spaces of democratic thinking and action.