  This paper deals with some computational aspects in the Bayesian analysis of
statistical models with intractable normalizing constants. In the presence of
intractable normalizing constants in the likelihood function, traditional MCMC
methods cannot be applied. We propose an approach to sample from such posterior
distributions. The method can be thought as a Bayesian version of the MCMC-MLE
approach of Geyer and Thompson (1992). To the best of our knowledge, this is
the first general and asymptotically consistent Monte Carlo method for such
problems. We illustrate the method with examples from image segmentation and
social network modeling. We study as well the asymptotic behavior of the
algorithm and obtain a strong law of large numbers for empirical averages.
