People working on early modern English and Irish nuns
Heartfelt thanks to all early modern #nuntastic scholars for their help in compiling these pages.
Cormac Begadon
Cormac Begadon is Assistant Professor in the History of Catholicism in the Department of Theology, Durham University. He is a historian of early modern religious and intellectual culture, with a particular research interest in Catholic religious and their interactions with the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Currently he is researching the history of the Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre (Sepulchrines) at Liège, exploring the theme of gender and the Catholic Enlightenment.
From 2015-17 he was a member of the AHRC-funded Monks in Motion Project, based at Durham University. From 2017-19 he was employed on a project exploring the history of Goldenbridge, a large centre of institutional and educational care in Dublin, founded in the mid-nineteenth century. The project was undertaken in conjunction with the Sisters of Mercy and University College Dublin. He is currently finishing a monograph, ‘Goldenbridge, 1855-1910: a history of Catholic institutional care’.
Caroline Bowden
Caroline Bowden is Senior Research Fellow, Queen Mary University of London; she led several major projects to fruition; including: The English Convents in Exile 1600-1800, 6 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012-2013 and the Who Were the Nuns? website and database. She also co edited with James Kelly The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800. Communities, Culture and Identities, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013. Her current research is focused on books and learning in the convents with a number of papers presented in 2017 and chapters underway for publication next year (2018).
In recent years, she has published an article, ‘Building libraries in exile: The English convents and their book collections in the seventeenth century. British Catholic History, 32 (2015) : 343-382, a book chapter ‘The English convents in exile and their neighbours: extended networks, patrons and benefactors’, in Helen Hackett (ed.), Early Modern Exchanges: Intercultural Encounters and dialogues, 1500-1700 ‘Ashgate, 2015), and an edition of primary sources Chronicles of Nazareth (English Convent, Bruges) 1629-1793 (Catholic Record Society and Boydell and Brewer, 2017). Another book chapter is to be published soon: ‘English Reading Communities in Exile: Introducing Cloistered Nuns to their Books’ in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation, Leah Knight and Micheline White (eds.), (University of Michigan Press, 2018).
Marie-Louise Coolahan
Marie-Louise Coolahan is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is currently Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700 .

Liesbeth Corens
Liesbeth Corens‘s work focuses on minority Catholicism as an insightful case study to analyse the Counter-Reformation. Her first book assesses the lay English Catholic expatriate experience in terms of a broad concept of ‘confessional mobility’ (forthcoming with OUP). It encourages a more flexible interpretation of movement and its implications for belonging to communities. Changing perspective opens up our study to include pilgrims, grand tour travellers, students, and mobile scholars alongside exiles. The diversity of mobility highlights that those abroad were never cut off, isolated on the Continent. Rather, through correspondence and constant travel they created a community without borders. This cross-Channel community was not defined by its status as victims of persecution, but provided the lifeblood for English Catholics for generations.
Her next project is about archives and record keeping, through the prism of the ‘counter-archives’ which Catholics minorities (both English and Dutch) started to create in the later seventeenth century. Rather than understanding the collections as unproblematic repositories, she acknowledges them as practices and processes. She explores how and why the compilations were put together, what selection has been made, and what the ordering of the material has done to its interpretations. An important context for these commemorations is the exclusion of Catholics from the dominant narratives of both England and the Dutch Republic. While official archives and accounts had produced a narrative of the Protestant nation in which Catholics were either excluded or acted as the villains, the Catholic collections aimed to save the memory and reputation of their ancestors. Liesbeth has recently published an article and contributed two edited volumes on that subject with Alexandra Walsham and Kate Peters. Her monograph, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe, was published with OUP in 2019.
Jaime Goodrich is a Professor of English at Wayne State University. She specializes in early modern literature, with a focus on early modern women writers and religion, especially Catholicism. Her first monograph analyzes early modern Englishwomen’s devotional translations (Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England, 2014), and her second monograph discusses the philosophical implications of texts by English Benedictine nuns (Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600-1800, University of Alabama Press, 2021). In collaboration with Laurence Lux-Sterritt, she is finishing an edition of documents related to spiritual quarrels among the Brussels Benedictines during the 17th century.

Joanne E. Myers
Joanne E. Myers teaches courses in eighteenth-century literature and culture and book history at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. She is broadly interested in the representation of religious experience in modernity, and her current research focuses on English Catholic devotional literature from the Reformation through the eighteenth century, with a special focus on “devotional authorship” in convent writings. At the Durham Residential Library, she has held Holland (2019) and Barker (2024) Visiting Fellowships, and in spring 2024 she held a Fulbright Scholar grant at Durham University to study the archive of the Poor Clares Darlington. Two articles based on her research at Durham are “Catholics, Property, and the Experience of the Penal Laws: Evidence from the Vincent Eyre Manuscripts,” British Catholic History 36 (2022) and “Manuscript Devotional Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Convents: A Case Study,” Eighteenth-Century Life 48 (2024). She has also published articles on the role of conversion in Jane Barker’s poetry and prose and the representation of cases of conscience in plays by Catharine Trotter Cockburn.

Nicky Hallett
Nicky Hallett is interested in the life-writing of early modern nuns. They produced an amazing array of work, fascinating in its diversity and opening new perspectives on political and religious change in Europe.
She has published a number of chapters and essays, and a study of The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (2013), as well editions of previously undisclosed manuscripts: Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (2007) and Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula was once bewitched and Sister Margaret twice’ (2007). She also edited a volume in Caroline Bowden’s series on English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Life Writing I (2012). She continues to research, having retired in 2016 from the University of Sheffield.

Scholastica Jacob
Previously a Benedictine nun at Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire (founded at Cambrai, 1623) Scholastica Jacob is now a final year PhD student at the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, supervised by Dr James Kelly. Her doctoral thesis is entitled: ‘From Exile to Exile: Repatriation, resettlement, and the contemplative experience of English Benedictine nuns in England 1795–1838’. This proposes that a revisionist approach to the study of the returning English convents in the nineteenth century is required: one which examines the re-establishment of contemplative life in England through the lens of exile and identity. It explores the on-going history of the Benedictines from Brussels, Cambrai, Ghent, Paris and Dunkirk after their arrival in England. Scholastica’s areas of research include the development of devotional practices, the rebuilding of the nuns’ libraries, the re-establishment of monastic observance in pre-Emancipation England. In particular this work views the nuns in the context of their engagement with Catholic Enlightenment thought and the backlash to it in the early nineteenth century.
While her current research focusses on the Benedictines, Scholastica is also gathering information on the experience of the other English convents who re-located to England and hopes to develop this work in the future. She has also worked on the establishment of women’s Benedictine contemplative life within the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century and the links between Catholic and Anglican communities: another area for future development.
James Kelly
James Kelly is Sweeting Fellow in the History of Catholicism at Durham University. He leads the History of Catholicism research strand within the university’s Centre for Catholic Studies, which has run several projects on the history of women religious. In this role, he acts as conference director of the biennial Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism conference, which is organized jointly by Durham University and the University of Notre Dame, USA (he is also an adjunct professor at the latter). He was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Monks in Motion,’ (@monksinmotion on Twitter) which investigated the experience of the English and Welsh Benedictines in exile, c.1553–1800, and was a member of the AHRC-funded ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ project, acting as Project Manager of its follow-on initiative. He is joint general editor of the recently commissioned five-volume The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism (Oxford University Press, expected 2022).
He is the author of English Convents in Catholic Europe, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and has edited several works on early modern English nuns, including volume 5 on convent management in the 6-volume The English Convents in Exile 1600-1800, gen ed. Caroline Bowden (Pickering & Chatto, 2012–2013), and co-edited with Caroline Bowden The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Communities, Culture and Identities (Ashgate, 2013).

Jenna Lay
Jenna Lay is associate Professor in the English Department at Lehigh University. She studies early modern English literature, with specific attention to post-Reformation religious culture, poetry and poetics, female authors, and the intersection of manuscript and print technologies. After receiving her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture, was published in 2017 with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Laurence Lux-Sterritt
Laurence Lux-Sterritt is Senior Lecturer of early modern English Studies at Aix-Marseille Université (France); she is affiliated to the LERMA (E.A. 853) research centre. Before becoming more specifically interested in English nuns, she had published a monograph —Redefining Female Religious Life. French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth Century Catholicism (Ashgate, 2005)— and several articles on Mary Ward and the French Ursulines, both in French and English.
After becoming associated with the Who Were the Nuns? Project, she focused her research on English nuns; she edited the second volume (Spirituality) of the six-volume series English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800 (Pickering and Chatto, 2012-2013) and contributed a chapter to Bowden, Caroline and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800, Communities, Culture and Identity (Ashgate, 2013). She has focused more specifically on the Benedictine order, particularly in her latest monograph, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century. Living Spirituality (Manchester University Press, 2017). For that study, her research touched upon the topics of materiality, spirituality, the body, emotions, and the senses. She is currently involved with Jaime Goodrich in the edition of the manuscripts documenting the controversy at the Benedictine convent of Brussels.
Katie McKeogh
Following a first degree in History and English Literature at the University of Durham, Katie McKeogh moved to Oxford in 2011 to begin graduate work in History. She completed the MSt in Modern British and European History in 2012 and the DPhil in 2018, both under the supervision of Dr Susan Brigden FBA and Dr Alexandra Gajda. Katie is currently the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow at New College, Oxford.
Katie’s work is concerned with the transformation of English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the experience of Catholics and the ways in which they shaped, and were shaped by, English culture. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham (1543-1605) and Early Modern Catholic Culture and Identity, 1580-1610’, focused on a significant member of the English Catholic elite. It explored non-traditional and non-violent forms of political resistance through the examination of important cultural spheres: libraries and architecture. Her post-doctoral work, under the working title ‘Gentleman Scholars and the “Englishing” of the Catholic Community, 1560-1660’, explores the role that Catholics played in antiquarian activity, how collecting and compiling historical material allowed those faithful to a proscribed religion to shape English culture in their own time and beyond.
Katie has broader research interests in British cultural and religious history, the history of the book, and music. She has consulted for the National Trust (Lyveden New Bield) on Tresham’s building projects and for Stonor Park on Elizabeth and Jacobean recusancy. Her publications are featured on Academia.

Tonya Moutray
Tonya J. Moutray is a Professor of English at Russell Sage College at Troy, NY, where she teaches courses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Literature, the history of medicine & nursing, and children’s Literature. She was a Chawton House Library Fellow in June of 2017 and a Durham Residential Library Research Fellow in Feb-Mar of 2022. Her forthcoming chapter, “Taking the Veil: English Fashion and Female Religious, 1790-1830″ in Cormac Begadon, Gemma Betros and Sarah Barthelémy (eds), Female religious and narratives of the French Revolution, 1789–1850: identity, memory, and history (Boydell and Brewer) presents the findings of research conducted during both fellowships. She is the author of Refugee Nuns, the French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture (Routledge Press, 2016) and “Convents and Women Religious” in Liam Chambers (ed), The Oxford History of Irish and British Catholicism, Vol III (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is currently studying the experiences of women religious on the Continent during the Napoleonic Wars and their encounters with the Wordsworths on their 1820 European tour.
Emilie Murphy
Emilie Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, at the University of York. Her research interests lie broadly in the cultural and religious history of England, and English speaking people, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emilie’s published research to date has focused predominantly on the experiences of post-Reformation English Catholics. Her earliest work considered the multifaceted ways English Catholics used music – defined to include vocal and instrumental sounds, performance, composition, and material culture – to foster confessional identity in the face of persecution. This resulted in several articles on ballad culture, martyrdom and memorialisation. Emilie’s other main interests surround travel and mobility. She has previous and forthcoming publications on multilingualism, transnationalism, linguistic encounter, power and identity which all focus on evidence from English nuns in enclosed convents in Catholic Europe. This stemmed from her time on the European Research Council funded project ‘The Reception and Circulation of Women’s Writing, 1550-1700’ (RECIRC) at the University of Galway, where she remains a Research Associate. Emilie is currently writing a short monograph on Listening to Early Modern Travel Writing for Cambridge University Press, which brings her longstanding interests in acoustic culture together with her work on mobility and encounter to argue that the epistemic value of sound and listening (real and imagined) was fundamental to early modern travel writing.
Emilie is also working on two further projects, on the reception of the Whole Booke of Psalmes in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, and on sixteenth-century female protestant life-writing and the Bible. She is also in the early, tentative, scoping stages of a monograph project provisionally dubbed Exiled Lives: English Nuns in Catholic Europe, which will endeavour to offer a new cultural history of the thousands of women who left England from c.1600-1800 to join English convents abroad.

Laura Roberts
Laura Roberts is a DPhil candidate focusing on women and religion in the early modern period at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral project examines the religious ideas and images used to talk about national identity and belonging by English nuns in continental exile during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After receiving her BA in History from Duke University, Laura completed her MPhil in British and European History at Oxford.

Claire Schiano-Locurcio
Claire Schiano-Locurcio is a postdoctoral researcher at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, where she contributes to the ANR-funded project Abbesses, Seigneuresses et Réformatrices (https://anrasr.hypotheses.org). This project investigates the political, social, and religious authority exercised by Benedictine abbesses in early modern France, focusing on their roles as spiritual leaders, territorial lords, and agents of reform within their communities.
She holds a PhD in Early Modern British Civilisation from Aix-Marseille Université. Her doctoral research focuses on the English Poor Clares in exile during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on their interpretation and practice of the Franciscan vow of poverty. It argues that poverty – far from being a generic ideal – was actively shaped and valorised as a core element of religious and institutional identity. Adopting a comparative approach with contemporary French Poor Clare convents, the study reveals both shared ideals and national distinctiveness in the lived experience of poverty. Based on a rich manuscript corpus, it examines foundation processes, economic practices, and spiritual life through the lens of poverty.
Claire is also a member of the project Mapping Multifaith London, 1690–1730 (https://mml.hypotheses.org), co-hosted by Aix-Marseille Université and Queen Mary University of London, which examines the spatial and cultural dynamics of religious diversity in post-Reformation London. She also contributes to the research group Places and Spaces of Devotion, conducted in partnership with Durham University, which analyses how spaces, places, and objects of the early modern period served as loci of spirituality and devotion.

Martin Thompson
Martin Thompson is a PhD student in the Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. His interdisciplinary project entitled ‘Prepare the Canons!’: Mary Ward and her followers at the vanguard of ‘Life editing’ seeks to place early modern life writing by and about the Catholic exile Mary Ward (1585-1645) in broader intellectual, cultural and historical contexts in order to interrogate assumptions about early modern life writing and its relation to gender, confessional identity and literary tradition.
His Master’s study at the John Rylands Library and Research Institute led to a particular interest in the materiality of texts and the transmission and ownership history of Catholic manuscripts. His archive-based research therefore also considers the complicated afterlives of these texts and the insight they provide into continuities and profound transformations in Catholic culture across time and space.

Victoria Van Hyning
Victoria also works on crowdsourcing projects with Zooniverse.org, the world-leading academic crowdsourcing platform. In 2015 Zooniverse, in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, D.C.) and the Oxford English Dictionary, launched Shakespeare’s World, an early modern manuscript transcription project. In the discussion forum, Victoria encourages volunteers to use #Catholic and #womanwriter to identify manuscripts that contain information relevant to these broad categories. So far, volunteers have transcribed nearly 7,000 pages, many of which contain material pertaining to Catholics and women writers. Victoria will use these findings in her future literary work.
