Rate My Professor Hayley Bowman

Hayley Bowman serves as Assistant Professor of History at Fairmont State University in the College of Liberal Arts, also identified as Assistant Professor of World History. Her academic career is rooted in the study of the early modern Spanish world, with research interests centered on women, religion, and place/space. She engages with questions of gender, materiality, iconography, and theology in the premodern Atlantic, particularly focusing on knowledge pathways and the experiences of religious women in the seventeenth-century Spanish monarquía. Bowman's scholarship explores early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, including the history of women and gender, art, image, and materiality, religious communities, and place and space studies. Her doctoral work centers on Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, examining visual components, capacities for sight, methods of communication, and reproduction of visions to investigate her engagement, ideas, and influence across sacred and earthly realms.

Bowman earned her B.A. in History and Sociology and M.A. in History from Purdue University. Her master's thesis, titled “A Church Divided: The Dominicans, Franciscans, and the Eucharistic Debates in Early Modern Spain,” received the Best Thesis Award from Purdue's College of Liberal Arts in 2015. She completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan, where her dissertation, “Ineffable Knowing: Sor Maria de Jesus de Agreda in the Early Modern Spanish World,” built on these themes. During her doctoral studies, she held a Rackham Merit Fellowship and was awarded the Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar grant from the University of New Mexico’s Latin American & Iberian Institute in 2019 to support dissertation research. At Fairmont State University, Bowman contributes to faculty governance as a member of senate committees, including those representing Social Sciences and the Library Committee, and advises the Pi Gamma Mu Honor Society chapter, an international organization for the social sciences. She has delivered campus presentations on LGBT+ history in the pre-modern world and historical perceptions of witchcraft in Europe and America.