Robin Macdonald completed both her BA (History and French) and MA (Early Modern History) at the University of Manchester before beginning her AHRC-funded PhD in History at the University of York (UK) in October 2011. Her thesis focuses on the creation of Catholic sacred spaces and spaces of religious encounter in New France. Using a combination of sensory history, anthropology and spatial theory, it examines the ways in which early modern peoples created, used, and inhabited these spaces. Through a haptic and spatial re-reading of well-known sources (such as the Jesuit Relations) and less well-known archival material (such as maps), it argues that spaces and the ways in which bodies moved through these spaces played an important role in shaping devotional practices, conversions, and beliefs.
