About
Haley Bowen is a doctoral candidate in the History department, specializing in the early modern French empire. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled “Breaching the Cloister: Laywomen, Convents, and the State in the Early Modern French Empire,” examines how laywomen in Paris and New France engaged with the convent as an ambiguous space of both incarceration and spiritual retreat. More broadly, her research interests include gender and power in the early modern world, confessionalization and religious conflict, material culture, and early European colonialism. Her work has been generously supported by grants from the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Rackham Graduate School, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, the Meeter Center at Calvin College, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at the University of Michigan, and the History department at the University of Michigan. Haley graduated from Harvard College in 2014 with an A.B. degree in History and Literature, where her senior honors thesis, “The King's Third Body: Representations of Christian Kingship in the Valois Tombs,” was awarded a Thomas T. Hoopes prize. From 2019-2021 she was affiliated as a visiting researcher at the Centre des recherches historiques (CRH) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
