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Publication Luncheon with Dr. Ann Harrington

Thursday, 6 February 2014
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM
Cuneo Hall, Room 425
Lake Shore Campus, LUC

By invitation only!

My academic teaching field and, consequently, research has been Japan and East Asia. In 2001 the administration of my religious congregation, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as BVMs, invited me to research our founder, Mary Frances Clarke. Agreeing to this took me into new territory. I had done research on the French nuns who, in the nineteenth century, were the first Roman Catholic sisters to go to Japan. That project convinced me of the importance of studying the history of women religious in order to expand women's history and history in general, and I think influenced the BVMs to invite me to look more deeply into our own congregation's history.

My current research is titled Expanding Horizons: Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1919-1943. No one has yet written anything specifically covering that period of our congregation's history. Therefore, it is somewhat of an overview of the era when Isabella Kane, followed by Gervase Tuffy, each served as the mother general of the BVM congregation. The work focuses on a variety of issues such as modernism, Americanism, patriotism, and the aftermath of World War I. And it includes outreach to the American Indian youth at the Phoenix American Indian School at the invitation of the Jesuits. I chose Chapter Seven titled "New Frontiers" for discussion. Here, major issues of racism and of culture surface as BVMs moved into Memphis, Tennessee where they taught African American students. Also I explore BVM response to the invitation to work in China.

~ Dr. Ann M. Harrington
LUC Department of History