Shannen Dee Williams

Shannen Dee Williams is an assistant professor of United States and African-American history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She is currently completing the manuscript for a book entitled, “Subversive Habits: Black Nuns and the Struggle to Desegregate Catholic America after World War I.” When published, it will be just the first historical monograph on black Catholic sisters in the twentieth-century United States. Dr. Williams is a cradle Catholic and a winner of the 2010 John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award from the American Catholic Historical Association and the 2011 Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship for Religion and Ethics from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation.