Kevin Lewis O'Neill awarded Guggenheim Fellowship
Published: April 12, 2021
Kevin Lewis O'Neill, a professor in the department for the study of religion in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, O’Neill is a pioneering scholar on the subject of clerical sexual abuse, particularly as it transcends borders. He is currently writing two books. The first considers clerical sexual abuse in Latin America, with a focus on U.S. priests who moved – or were moved – to Central America to evade suspicion. The second is an ethnography of traffic in Guatemala City that realigns conversations about security, mobility, and infrastructure in Latin America.
“The Guggenheim Fellowship comes at exactly the right time for me: at a moment when I need some time to consider the conceptual and political intricacies of transnational clerical sexual abuse,” O'Neill says. “I’m very grateful to the Foundation.”
O’Neill’s examination of the moral dimensions of contemporary political practice in Latin America informs the trilogy he has already written on the politics of Pentecostalism in Guatemala. Each of these books explores the “waning viability of disciplinary institutions and how new strains of Christian piety have become recognizable modes of governance in Central America.”
