Fall Lecture via Zoom

For most people, Whoopi Golberg’s performance as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act is the dominant interpretation of an African American nun and the desegregation of white Catholic sisterhood in the United States. 

In this conversation, however, Dr. Shannen Dee Williams will explore what she calls “America’s real sister act”: the story of how generations of Black women and girls called to the sacred vows of poverty, chastity and obedience fought against racism, sexism, and exclusion. She calls attention to women’s religious life as an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.   

Dr. Shannen Dee Williams

Dr. Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton. A historian of the African American experience with research and teaching specializations in women’s, religious, and Black freedom movement history, she is author of Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke University Press).

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