Loreto founder Mary Ward's life and work will be celebrated around the world for three full years (2009-2012) in honour of the 400th anniversary of the establishment of her first religious community. This book will be a major contribution to this anniversary. Australian author. Loreto nuns have also worked in indigenous communities.

This book charts the history of how Irish-born nuns became involved in education in the Anglophone world. It presents a heretofore undocumented study of how these women left Ireland to establish convent schools and colleges for women around the globe. It challenges the dominant narrative that suggests that Irish teaching Sisters, also commonly called nuns, were part of the colonial project, and shows how they developed their own powerful transnational networks. Though they played a role in the education of the ‘daughters of the Empire’, they retained strong bonds with Ireland, reproducing their own Irish education in many parts of the Anglophone world.

This book explores Roman Catholic female missionaries and their placement in colonial and postcolonial India. It offers fascinating insights into their idiomatic activism, juxtaposed with a contrarian Protestant raj and with their own church patriarchies. During the Great Revolt of 1857, these women religious hid in church steeples. They were forced into the medical care of sexually diseased women in Lock Hospitals. They followed the Jesuits to experimental tribal village domains and catered for elites in the airy hilltop stations of the raj. Yet, they could not escape the eugenic and child rescue practices that were the flavour of the imperial day. New geographies of race and gender were also created by their social and educational outreach. This allowed them to remain on the subcontinent after the tide went out on empire in 1947. Their religious bodies remained untouched by India yet their experience in the field built awareness of the complex semiotics and visual traces engaged by the East/West interchange. After 1947, their tropes of social outreach were shaped by their direct interaction with Indians. Many new women religious were now of the same race or carried a strongly anti-British Irish ancestry. In the postcolonial world their historicity continues to underpin their negotiable Western-constructed activism - now reaching trafficked girls and those in modern-day slavery. The uncovered and multi-dimensional contours of their work are strong contributors to the current Black Lives Matter debates and how the etymology and constructs of empire find their way into current NGO philanthropy.