Biography
Cella Masso-Rivetti is pursuing a PhD in Religion from Columbia University with a specialization
in North American Religion. Their work is situated at the intersection of secularism and
Catholicism in the modern United States, a vantage point useful for assembling overlooked
intersections in the modern histories of religion and secularism, gender and sexuality, science
and medicine, feminisms, and American nationalism.
Cella’s dissertation traces citations of US Catholic priests’ writing and secular
conceptualizations of Catholic priests’ sexual and religious alterity through interwar public
debates about birth control and reproduction, eugenics and heredity, and marriage bars and
women’s labor. Their dissertation research animates how sexual progress narratives were
renewed in the early 20 th century US in the context of increasing bodily medicalization and
transnational shifts in the Vatican’s articulation of sex.
Cella has been a researcher on multiple projects about Catholic priests and Catholic women
religious leaders, including interviewing Catholic priests in New York City about the clergy
sexual abuse crisis for the Catholic University of America’s National Study of Catholic Priests.
Their master’s project at NYU involved working with forty Catholic women religious leaders
across the US who unstably bridge secular and Catholic feminisms and alter authoritative
Catholic framings of gender through their religious practice.