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Black Catholic Women Religious – Agency and Obstacles with Diane Batts Morrow

Diane Batts Morrow is Associate Professor Emerita of History and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She taught courses which focused on the African American experience in United States history. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College with a B. A. in History, earned her M.S. in Social Science Education from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia. Her first book, Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860, which the University of North Carolina Press published in 2002, won that year’s Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. In 2004 the Conference on the History of Women Religious honored this work with its Distinguished Book Award. Morrow is currently working on a second volume which continues the story of this first Roman Catholic black sisterhood—which celebrated its 190th anniversary in 2019—into the middle of the twentieth century.