Haley Bowen
Assistant Professor
Interests
Geographic Field(s):
Medieval and Early Modern European History
Thematic Field(s):
Colonial, Imperial, and Diasporic History; Gender and Sexuality History; Religious History; Political and Policy History
Principal Research Interest(s):
Early Modern French Empire; Gender; History of Religion; State Formation
Biography
Haley Bowen (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2023) is a historian of the early modern French empire, with particular research interests in state-building, gender, and religious culture. Her current book project, provisionally entitled Breaching the Cloister: Laywomen, Convents, and the State in the Early Modern French Empire, explores how laywomen in Paris, New France, and Martinique engaged with monastic institutions as ambiguous sites of both incarceration and retreat. Bowen’s work has been supported by grants from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Rackham Graduate School and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, 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, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. She graduated from Harvard College in 2014 with an A.B. degree in History and Literature, and from 2019-2021 was affiliated as a visiting researcher at the Centre des recherches historiques (CRH) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.