The members of the Steering Committee are:

Executive Branch

Bronagh Ann McShane, President, is author of Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Woodbridge, 2022) and has published articles on aspects of her research in journals such as British Catholic History, Irish Historical Studies, Archivium Hibernicum and the Journal of Historical Network Research. She is joint guest editor of ‘A New Agenda for Women’s and Gender History in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies Special Issue (Nov. 2022); co-editor of Brides of Christ: Women and Monasticism in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland (2023) and contributor to volume 1 of The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism (Oxford, 2023). She completed her PhD (Irish Research Council-funded) at Maynooth University and previously held a National University of Ireland Research Fellowship at the University of Galway. She is currently a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, working on the ERC-funded project, VOICES of Women in Early Modern Ireland (https://voicesproject.ie/). X: @BA_McShane; Bluesky: @bamcshane.bsky.social

Catriona Delaney, Secretary, is a historian of modern Ireland who specialises in the history of education, the history of women religious, and oral history. She has a PhD in history from the University of Limerick and is currently a Teaching Fellow with the School of Education, University College Dublin. She is co-author of Nano Nagle: the Life and the Legacy (Irish Academic Press, 2019) and has published in numerous national and international peer-reviewed journals including Irish Educational Studies, History of Education (UK), Journal of Feminist Theology, and Journal of Educational Administration and History. She is also a member of the UCD ConventCollections team. X: @CatrionaMDelaney

Treasurer, TBC

Dr Eilish Gregory, Conference Secretary, is the Little Company of Mary Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University. She specialises in the history of religion, politics, and culture in early modern Britain, as well as in the history of modern women religious through her research on the global missionary and nursing activities of the Little Company of Mary. She has a PhD in history from University College London and has held lectureship posts in history at the University of Reading, the Open University, Anglia Ruskin University, the Oxford Department for Continuing Education, and the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern in London. Since 2022, she has been a convenor for the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘Religious History of Britain 1500-1800’ Seminar. Her first monograph Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642-1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty was published by Boydell in 2021, and she has published extensively in early modern history for The Seventeenth Century and Parliamentary History journals, and edited collections for Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Brill Press. In 2024, her co-edited collection Later Stuart Queens, 1660-1735: Religion, Political Culture, and Patronage, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. X: @DrEilishGregory

Brian Heffernan, Communications Officer, is a historian of modern religion. He holds degrees in History (Leiden) and Catholic Theology (Tilburg) and has a PhD in History (Maynooth). He has written book-length histories of the Augustinian Friars (1886–2006) and the Discalced Carmelite nuns (1872–2020) in the Netherlands. On the latter, he published Modern Carmelite Nuns and Contemplative Identities: Shaping Spirituality in the Netherlands (Manchester University Press, 2024). His work focuses on the construction of religious identities and spirituality, and on memory, gender and power, and the impact of Vatican II-era reform. He is affiliated with KU Leuven and UCLouvain, is an editor of DHGE – Louvain Dictionary of Church History, and is working with Stephan van Erp (KU Leuven) on a biography of the Dominican friar and theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. He is also a board member of Stichting Echo, an organisation that promotes the historical study of religious in the Netherlands.

Other Steering Committee members

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).  She is co-founder of the research group The Other Sister, which looks at women religious who lived outside of the cloister.

Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a Lecturer at the School of History and a Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Queen Mary University of London. She has just completed her EU-funded project, ILLITTERATAE, which looks into 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, was a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School in 2021-22, and a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Fellow at Queen Mary. She has recently co-edited Living on the Edge: Transgression, Exclusion and Persecution in the Middle Ages (Gruyter, 2022) and a Special Issue of I quaderni del m.æ.s (University of Bologna, 2024). Her forthcoming book Networks of Defiance: Women and Heretical Conversion in the Late Middle Ages applies Social Network Analysis to the study of the practices and beliefs of women in dissident religious movements in the Late Middle Ages. She is a member and co-organizer of The Other Sister project (University of Toronto) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. X: @delfinietois

We have a number of volunteers who support H-WRBI and keep it up and running. If you would like to help in any of the areas below contact us.

• Book Reviews Editors: Yvonne Seale, Liz Goodwin & Flora Derounian
• Bibliography Editors
  • Medieval: Sara Charles
  • Early Modern: Bronagh McShane
  • Modern: Kristof Smeyers
  • Outside Britain & Ireland (Modern): Anselm Nye
• Web Editor: TBC
• Social Media: TBC for X, Melanie Carroll (Facebook)