Rev. Worcester, S.J., Associate Professor of History, Receives Marfuggi Award

WORCESTER, Mass. – Rev. Thomas Worcester, S.J., associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, was recently named the 2005-2006 recipient of the Mary Louise Marfuggi Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Made possible by a generous gift from Richard A. Marfuggi, M.D., ’72, in honor of his mother, the award recognizes faculty with an exemplary record of scholarship and outstanding achievement in the creation of an original work in the arts and sciences. He lives in Worcester.

“Tom was a key player in creating the highly acclaimed exhibition Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800 at the Worcester Art Museum last year,” said James Kee, interim vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College, who presented him the award. “The exhibition brought a great deal of favorable coverage to the city, to the museum, and to Holy Cross, and the exhibition was also a great critical success, reviewed favorably by, among others, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and National Catholic Weekly.”

Fr. Worcester also co-edited the exhibition catalog, and contributed an essay titled “Saint Roch vs. Plague, Famine, and Fear;” co-organized the Annual New England Renaissance Conference at the College that coincided with the exhibition’s theme “Plague and Piety in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe,” where he was one of the presenters; and gave no less than ten gallery tours for groups ranging from the College’s First-Year Program, to the Holy Cross Trustees and faculty, to the University of Massachusetts Medical School Symposium.

A faculty member since 1994, he is active in several professional associations. He is the author of Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus (Mouton de Gruyter, 1997) and was one of five co-curators of a 1999 exhibition at Boston College, Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image.

Fr. Worcester earned his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He received a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, a Licence en Philosophie from the Institut Supérieur de Théologie et de Philosophie de la Compagnie de Jésus, Paris, and a Licentiate in sacred theology from the Weston School of Theology.