Fall Lecture – Free and Open to the Public

Sunday, September 21, 2025 at 2:00 pm

In this presentation, Dr. Joseph Mannard reveals how American Catholic leadership, male and female, engaged in successful damage control following the 1831 flight from Georgetown Visitation Convent of Sister Ann Gertrude Wightt, America’s first “runaway nun.”  The story is drawn from Mannard’s new book, The Two Worlds of Ann Gertrude Wightt: How a Runaway Nun Became a Grand Lady of Washington, DC, Society (Georgetown University Press.)   

About the Speaker

Dr. Joseph Mannard (PhD, University of Maryland, College Park) is a specialist in nineteenth-century US social history, with strong interests in antebellum benevolence and reform movements and in religious history. Most of his published research focuses on American Catholicism in the nineteenth century; in particular, the lives of Roman Catholic nuns in the antebellum era, a topic that illuminates the histories of health and charitable work, education, immigration, and women.

Register to attend or stream online.

Event location: ACHS Headquarters, 263 South 4th Street, Philadelphia, PA  19106