Samuel Weber (PhD 2019, University of Bern, Switzerland, and University of Durham, UK) is an Advanced Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bern and a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. He is interested in the interplay between media and religion in the Catholic Mediterranean of the early modern period.

His work on the cults of the ‘Immaculate Conception’ and the ‘Sacred Heart’ looks at how the second media revolution of the eighteenth century amplified the voices of both the proponents and the critics of these divisive devotions and, in so doing, contributed to the fragmentation of Catholic public opinion. As a POLY Fellow, he examined the role of mass-produced devotional objects and novel habits of media consumption in the rapid spread of the cult of the ‘Sacred Heart’ from a Visitation convent in rural Burgundy to the rest of France and the wider Catholic world at the dawn of the eighteenth century.