This profile was current as of 2020 when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.
I began my Ph.D. in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame after completing my Master of Studies at the University of Oxford in Modern British and European history. I am now a fifth-year candidate whose research interests include the study of U.S. empire, the global sixties, religion in the Americas, and gender/women’s history. In my dissertation project entitled “Saving Latin America: Catholic Sisters and the Cultural Cold War, 1959-1979,” I investigate how one transnational religious network, Catholicism, waged a campaign against poverty during Latin America’s Cold War to ensure the cultural dominance of this religion in the region and worldwide. Specifically, I analyze how this female-dominated movement unfolded on the ground through the lens of four orders of Catholic sisters who established missions in the shared location of Chimbote, Peru, a global fishing port located on the northern coast. I am an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Religion and have received grants from Loyola University of Chicago and the Catholic University of America for my research.
Broadly, my research interests include the study of U.S. empire, the global sixties, religion in the Americas, and gender/women’s history. In my dissertation project entitled “Saving Latin America: Catholic Sisters and the Cultural Cold War, 1959-1979,” I investigate how one transnational religious network, Catholicism, waged a campaign against poverty during Latin America’s Cold War to ensure the cultural dominance of this religion in the region and worldwide. Specifically, I analyze how this female-dominated missionary movement unfolded on the ground in Chimbote, Peru, a global fishing port located on the northern coast, through the lens of four orders of Catholic sisters who established missions in this region. I examine how this Catholic network garnered support among “the choicest of God’s troops for spiritual conquest,” namely U.S. Catholic sisters, how those women tasked with carrying out this agenda changed their goals and strategies over the course of the 1960s political and theological revolutions, and how this transnational exchange reshaped the largest Christian denomination in the United States and in the world.