Donna Porche-Frilot Wins College of Education Distinguished Dissertation Award

“Propelled by Faith: Henriette Delille and the Literacy Practices of Black Women Religious in Antebellum New Orleans”
By Petra Munro Hendry, Advisor

Donna Porche-Frilot’s dissertation focuses on situating Henriette Delille (1812-1862) as an educational theorist and reformer within the larger story of Southern educational history. Among many accomplishments, Delille is credited with creating a black Roman Catholic teaching order known as the Sisters of the Holy Family, an organization cast as the first women civil rights advocates in Louisiana.

The Sisters of the Holy Family formed institutions—schools, orphan homes, elderly homes, convents—that became sites in which both free and enslaved African Americans could envision their identities beyond the dehumanizing effects of racism.

Porche-Frilot’s tedious archival research, some the first of its kind, was interwoven with census records and interviews she conducted at the archives of the Sisters of the Holy Family, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the New Orleans Archdiocesan Archives. What is remarkable about Porche-Frilot’s research is her attention to investigating the context which made the educational initiatives of the Sisters of the Holy Family possible—not only race but its complex intersections with religion, gender, place, history, and spirituality against the landscape of white supremacy.

Porche-Frilot’s work will have a profound impact on scholars’ understanding of how antebellum African American women shaped cultural and social institutions to promote a unique Afro-Latin-Creole theory of literacy that contested antebellum ideologies of racial inferiority.