2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellow
About
Hayley R. Bowman studies early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, with broad interests in women and gender; image and materiality; religious communities; and place and space studies. Her work focuses on women’s spiritual experiences, writings, and authority in the premodern Atlantic. She engages with questions of gender, materiality, iconography, and theology, especially considering women’s knowledge pathways and religious experiences. Bowman’s research explores the early modern Spanish world through the eyes of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, a Franciscan nun who influenced not only her confessors and her king, but also peoples and places across a transoceanic, composite monarquia.
Research Plan: As a postdoctoral fellow, Bowman will develop her dissertation into a book manuscript. She also plans to complete two articles: one focused on female mystical sensory engagement and another exploring the role of angels in Sor María’s accounts, placing them into the wider theological context of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.
