Prof Dominic A Aquila
Visiting Research Scholar
Professor Aquila is a Visiting Research Scholar at Blackfriars. During his residency he is undertaken a dual intellectual biography of Martin C D’Arcy, SJ and Bede Jarrett, OP.
He is Full Professor of History and Chair of Studio Arts and Art History at the University of St Thomas, Houston, where he also directs the Allbritton Art Institute. He holds the D. Litt. et Phil. from the University of South Africa and pursued doctoral studies in history at the University of Rochester under Christopher Lasch. He also holds an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University. His earlier formation was in musical composition and percussion at the Juilliard School, where he studied with Elliott Carter and David Diamond.
A lay Dominican, Dominic teaches in the Word on Fire Institute’s MA program at the University of St Thomas and has served extensively as a peer evaluator and Committee Chair for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. His scholarly interests span Catholic intellectual history, American cultural and religious thought, theological aesthetics, and the history of modern art and music. His current book project, Recovering the Republic: Natural Law and the Interpretive Re-Founding of American Democracy, 1938–1965, examines the convergent natural-law thought of Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, SJ, and Joseph Costanzo, SJ.
Select Publications:
‘The Learned Ear: Rhythm, Logos, and Liberal Education,’ in A Body of Learning: Articulating the Soul of Liberal Education, eds. Kevin M. Kambo & Christopher Petter, Bloomsbury Press (forthcoming 2026);
‘Light, Time, Sacrament: A Theological Reading of Impressionist Form.’ Religions (Special Issue: Spatio-Temporal Plurality in the Connection Between Art and the Sacred in Contemporary Society), (forthcoming 2026);
‘Music as a Liberal Art: The Poetry of the Universe,’ Religions 13: 792. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13090792;
The Church and the Age of Enlightenment (1648–1848): Faith, Science, and the Challenge of Secularism. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2022;
‘Purgatorio: A Liturgy of Forgiveness and Restoration,’ in Aaron B. Daniels, ed., Dante & The Other. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2021;
‘The Catholic Interpretive Tradition, Deconstruction, and the Murray Project,’ in D’Elia Krason, eds., We Hold These Truths and More: The Thought of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. Steubenville: Franciscan University Press, 1993, 216–224.
Email: aquilad@stthom.edu