This panel focuses on the relationship between material culture and the social construction of gender at the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans across three centuries of transatlantic exchanges. The study of the material culture of religion represents a long-established interest in material artifacts as sources of information about religious cultures. Religions are more than ideas or dogmas. They are about things, bodies, places, and spaces. Material culture does not merely reflect society; to the contrary, it can be understood to construct, maintain, control and transform social identities and relations (Gilchrist, 1994). The three papers will examine various aspects of Ursuline material culture (space, medicine, needlework, and photography) to illuminate the complex ways in which religious practices and belief exert agency, how they change over time, and how they interact with discourse and thought. Our research builds on recent scholarship (White, 2012; Rockman, 2024; Dawdy, 2016) in which material culture is understood as active in social relations.

These papers consider how Ursuline objects are proactive and integral to transatlantic race-making, blurring gendered boundaries, and navigating between religious and secular domains. Focusing on the eighteenth century, Petra Hendry explores the working relationship between Sister St. François Xavier, a French nun, and Jean-Baptiste, an enslaved African man. The pair worked together in the royal hospital as apothecaries. To counter the silences in official colonial records, Hendry looks to material culture and spatial analysis to understand the gendered and racial power dynamics of these two healers, arguing that their work subverted colonial definitions of medical practitioners. Moving into the nineteenth century, Lily Higgins analyzes two needlework samplers—one sewn by an Ursuline Academy student in New Orleans in 1815, the other by an Acadian woman in southwest Louisiana in 1819. A comparison of the samplers illustrates the ways material culture connected women within a broader Atlantic World. Yet, these connections went beyond thread and fabric. Higgins explores the role slaveholding played in the lives of these two women, as well as the Ursuline nuns. She argues that the student’s sampler, in particular, reflects the deep tensions wrought by the 1811 slave rebellion in St. John the Baptist Parish. Finally, Elizabeth Neidenbach’s paper focuses on the Ursulines at the turn of the twentieth century with an examination of the camera work of one of the nuns. Mother St. Croix, a pioneering female photographer in New Orleans, produced a body of work that still exists today in the form of glass plate negatives, lantern slides, and albumen prints. Considering the image content as well as the materials St. Croix used to produce and reproduce her photographs, Neidenbach argues that St. Croix’s employment of the camera, often to promote the Ursuline Academy, not only led her physically beyond the cloister’s walls but pushed her community into a more public sphere as the convent moved into the twentieth century. Together, these papers open new avenues to understanding the significant role of the Ursulines across three centuries in New Orleans and will appeal to academics and museum professionals.