Author Nancy Bradley Warren to Give Annual Shannon-Clark Lecture at W&L Warren’s lecture on March 24, which is free and open to the public, is titled "New World Nuns and the 'Old Religion’: The Afterlives of Medieval Female Spiritualities in the Early Modern Americas."

By Erica Turman
March 23, 2022

Nancy Bradley Warren, professor of English at Texas A&M University, will give the annual Shannon-Clark Lecture in English at Washington and Lee University on March 24 at 6:15 p.m. in Northen Auditorium on the W&L campus.

Warren’s talk, “New World Nuns and the ‘Old Religion’: The Afterlives of Medieval Female Spiritualities in the Early Modern Americas,” is free and open to the public.

Warren earned her doctorate in English from Indiana University. After completing a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan, she taught at Utah State University and Florida State University before being hired as head of the English Department and professor of English at Texas A&M University in 2011. At Texas A&M, Warren began her scholarly career focusing on medieval female spirituality, particularly female monasticism. Female spirituality and nuns remain a central focus of her work.

Warren has expanded her temporal and geographic focus since her first book on later medieval nuns. She has worked on texts and figures from medieval and early modern England, France and Spain in “Women of God and Arms,” “The Embodied Word” and “Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras.” Her current book in progress, entitled “Hemispheric Medievalisms: The ‘Old Religion’ in the New World, 1550-1850,” expands her temporal and geographic horizons further, as she will discuss in her talk at W&L.

The Shannon-Clark Lectures in English, established by a gift from a Washington and Lee alumnus who wishes to remain anonymous, honor the memories of Edgar Finley Shannon, chairman of Washington and Lee’s Department of English from 1914 until he died in 1938, and Harriet Mabel Fishburn Clark, a grandmother of the donor and a woman vitally interested in liberal arts education.