Joseph George Akl is a current PhD student in history at the Université de Montréal. He studies the transmission and reception of the vitae of the thirteenth-century mulieres religiosae from the Low Countries in England under the co-direction of professors Gordon Blennemann and Alison More.

For the Other Sister, Joseph will focus on the networks of non-cloistered women religious and how manuscript studies may permit this discussion. He also assisted in the administration and planning of The Other Sister’s first international conference.

Eleonora Cappuccilli is Marie Curie fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of Oslo with a project on the transnational circulation of female prophecy in Italy, Spain and England between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Her research interests broadly cover women’s political and theological thought in Early Modern European History. She has published two books: La critica imprevista. Teologia, politica e patriarcato in Mary Astell (2020) and La strega di Dio. Profezia politica, storia e riforma in Caterina da Racconigi (2020).

For the Other Sister, Eleonora intends to discuss the impact of the political and theological concept of prophecy on the exchanges between women in time and space, and across literary genres and territories.

Alison More is Associate Professor of Medieval Studies and the inaugural holder of the Comper Professorship in Medieval Studies at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Her research investigates the intersections between social and religious culture in Northern Europe from 1250 to 1450. She is primarily is interested in women’s experiences, as well as alternative interpretations of absences and inconsistencies in the historical record. Her publications include Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities (OUP, 2018). 

For the Other Sister, Alison plans to focus on the roles that women commonly known as beguines and tertiaries held in the cities of the southern Low Countries during the later medieval and early modern period. She is also planning to do some further work of the Grey Sisters, and other women who worked in hospitals. 

Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Fellow, Lecturer in History and a Fellow at the Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She’s currently working on her EU-funded project, ILLITTERATAE, which aims to research women’s role in the transmission of alternative religious ideas, focusing on communities of beguines across the medieval Mediterranean. She completed her PhD at the University of Barcelona in 2018, focusing on the application of Social Network Analysis to the study of dissident religious movements in the Late Middle Ages, and was a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School in 2021-22. She has recently co-edited Living on the Edge: Transgression, Exclusion and Persecution in the Middle Ages (Gruyter, 2022).

Dr Amanda Pullan is a historian of visual and print culture, textiles, women and religion, the Bible and Early Modern Europe. She completed a PhD on seventeenth-century embroidery: ‘The Bible, the Senses, and the Virtues: Popular Topics in British Women’s Seventeenth-Century Needlework’.  She is interested in how religious and cultural changes stemming from the Reformations were experienced in everyday life, and how they were responded to by women, in Reformed and Catholic traditions, and in material culture. She is a sessional lecturer in history at Knox College, University of Toronto.

Devon Sherwood is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She studies women religious in late-medieval and early modern Western Europe. Her research focuses on the intersections between religion, gender, aging, agency, and book ownership.

For The Other Sister, she plans to explore how women religious may have used books, such as Books of Hours, in their personal devotion 

Kristin Simpson is a non-degree student at the University of Toronto taking classes in medieval studies and considering future graduate work in this area. Right now, she is particularly interested in Walter de Châtillon’s Alexandreis. Over two decades ago, she earned a BA in English and Latin and an MA in English (focusing on Old and Middle English), as well as a BEd, all from the University of Toronto. Since then, she has worked as an academic editor and held various jobs in K–12 education, including co-founding an alternative school.

Tanya Stabler Miller is associate professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and several articles and book chapters on lay religion and heresy, medieval universities and masculinity, and devout laywomen and caregiving labor. She has recently co-edited a volume of essays on medieval gender, labor, and inter-faith encounters (Medieval Work, Worship, and Power: Persuasive and Silenced Voices, forthcoming in 2024 with Routledge). She is currently working on a book project titled “Men, Women, and Religious Networks in Medieval France.” This project aims to uncover a significant spiritual and intellectual network that included the two seemingly disparate, gendered worlds of the exclusively male university and the female religious community (beguines).

Patricia Stoop is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute of the University of Antwerp. In her interdisciplinary research Patricia Stoop focuses on women’s participation in the intellectual, religious, and literary culture of the Low Countries (c. 1350–1650). She is one of the initiators of the international project Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe (in collaboration with Virginia Blanton, University of Missouri-Kansas City and Veronica O’Mara, University of Hull). The three edited volumes have been published by Brepols (2013, 2015, and 2017). Other key publications are Schrijven in commissie. De zusters uit het Brusselse klooster Jericho en de preken van hun biechtvaders (ca. 1456–1510) (2013) and, together with Veronica O’Mara,  Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Catholic Preachers and Catholic Preaching Across Manuscript and Print (c. 1450 to c. 1550) (2022).

For the Other Sister project, Dr. Stoop aims to work on the literary and intellectual culture in communities of non-cloistered women.

Kirsty Schut was a 2022/23 Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. She obtained a PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies in 2019 with a dissertation on the fourteenth-century Dominican theologian John of Naples. Her current research focuses on the phenomenon of lay Christians seeking to die and/or be buried in religious habits from the Middle Ages into the modern era. Her first publication on the topic is “Death and a Clothing Swap: An Unusual Case of Death and Burial in the Religious Habit from Fourteenth-Century Naples,” Viator 2019 [2020]: 185-226.

For the Other Sister project, Kirsty was keeping an eye out for lay burials in ‘other sister’ type habits and ‘other sisters’ being buried in monastic habits.

Isabel Harvey is FNRS postdoctoral fellow in Early Modern Italian History at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and member of the Groupe de Recherche en Histoire des Sociabilités (GRHS) of the UQAM. Her current research project, entitled “The Environmental Impact of the Catholic Church: Missions, Mobility, and Climate in Southern Italy, France, and North America in the Early Modern Period,” focuses on the Catholic Church’s environmental impact and its strategies of environmental adaptation in the context of the evangelizing missions between the 16^th and 18^th centuries. Her main areas of research include the early modern Catholic Church, women religious life and circulation of information. 

For TOS, Dr. Harvey started this blog and worked on non-cloistered religious women from early modern Papal States – especially the cases of the little cities of the Marche and Umbria – and Naples – the Dominican Third Order. 

Michael Hahn is a medievalist, theologian and church historian. While in our research group, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Tutor in the History of Christianity for the University of London’s distance-learning Divinity courses. He works primarily on the intersection of late-medieval mystical theology and the development of early-Franciscan theologies, institutions and identities and gained a PhD in this field from the University of St Andrews. As well as continuing existing research into the early-Franciscan mystical traditions, Dr. Hahn is now embarking on a new project entitled From Umbrian Laywoman to the “Teacher of Theologians”: how Angela of Foligno was made Magistra Theologorum. This project seeks to identify the cross-confessional and cross-temporal perceptions and receptions of Angela of Foligno and her Liber from her death in 1309 to 1624 when Angela was called Magistra Theologorum (“Teacher of Theologians”) by the Dutch Jesuit Maximilian Sandaeus. 

For the Other Sister, Dr. Hahn worked on the mystical authority claimed by (and associated with) laywomen such as Angela of Foligno, and the changing perception of Angela’s alignment to Franciscan spirituality as her Liber circulated throughout Europe after her death.

Gustave Ineza is a PhD Candidate at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Order of Preachers, also known as Dominican friars. He started studying Christian-Muslim relations at Blackfriars Hall/University of Oxford in 2011. His current research includes the study of colonial influences on Christian-Muslim relations in formerly colonized African countries. He is working on The Evolution of Christian-Muslim relations in Rwanda, from the Belgian Colonial Period to the post-genocide era. This historical assessment aims to demonstrate that interfaith relations are not static but depend on various forces, including non-theological ones. 

For the Other Sister project, Ineza focused on the beguines and tertiaries.

Camila Justino is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto pursuing a major in Books and Media Studies and a double minor in Medieval Studies and Celtic Studies. She has four books published for youth in Brazil. Her first non-fiction essay written in English was published by Guts Magazine and is included in the book Wherever I Find Myself (Caitlin Press, 2017). A second essay, “Dear English Language,” will also be included in Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language (Book*Hug in 2021). The undefined place of religious women from the Middle Ages and the aesthetics and the motives of vernacular theology inspire Camila’s writings. She is writing Broken English her first book in English. 

For the the Other Sister, Camila was responsible for the communication between participants.