Reading and Q&A with ‘Subversive Habits’ Author Shannen Dee Williams
Reading and Q&A with Historian Shannen Dee Williams
Tuesday, February 21, 7:30 p.m. E.T.
Registration with a $5 donation is required. Once registered, you will receive an email with the Zoom link.
You must also be registered to receive the full recording following the event.
On February 21, Call To Action will host award-winning historian Shannen Dee Williams, author of Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. Williams will read a selection from her book and then participate in a facilitated Q&A session.
In 1966, when American sisterhood was at its peak, roughly 1,000 women of African descent were enrolled in religious life in the United States. Prior to 1946, women religious orders were segregated, with Black women denied entrance into all-white orders (except those women who could pass as white). Even after religious orders were desegregated, Black women experienced discrimination in their majority-white orders and were frequently barred from participating in civil rights events and other efforts to organize for racial justice. Still, Black women religious were at the frontlines of the civil rights and other emerging social movements. They helped shape and define Catholic education. This history of Black Catholic nuns may be little known, but it’s an essential part of both American and American Catholic history.
Billed as the first history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, Subversive Habits explores the ways in which Black girls and women used the sisterhood as a form of resistance. Williams draws on both oral histories and archival research, including previously sealed church documents, to trace this history of resistance, rebellion, and spiritual and cultural formation.
This event requires registration with a $5 donation. Register here.
This reading and Q&A session will also be recorded; you must register to receive the recording following the event.
About Shannen Dee Williams
Image Courtesy of Shannen Dee Williams
Dr. Shannen Dee Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton. She is an award-winning scholar of the African American experience and Black Catholicism with research and teaching specializations in women’s, religious, and Black freedom movement history.
Dr. Williams received a B.A. in history with magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from Agnes Scott College, a M.A. in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. A lifelong Catholic, Dr. Williams also authored the award-winning column, The Griot’s Cross, for the Catholic New Service.
