College Relations

Dr. Nancy L. Schultz, professor of English and coordinator of graduate studies in English, is the author of a highly-acclaimed book, Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), which will be released Oct. 17.

Reviewed as "a scholarly study that is also gripping drama," the book reconstructs the cultural forces surrounding an 1834 riot that destroyed a convent school in Charlestown, Mass. Between 1826 and 1834, the Charlestown Ursuline Academy was an elegant boarding school catering to the daughters of Boston's Protestant aristocracy.

But the Academy also provoked the ill will of its working-class neighbors, as much on account of the privilege it symbolized, and the intimidating independence of the women who directed it, as because of anti-Catholic prejudice. With painstaking scholarship and stylish, vivid description, Dr. Schultz traces the series of events that fanned the smoldering resentment into frenzy.

President William Bulger of the University of Massachusetts has applauded Dr. Schultz's newest book: "This is a scholarly and carefully researched Go to Fire and Roses sitework, as gripping and galvanizing as a good detective novel." More accolades come from Dr. Thomas H. O'Connor, University Historian of Boston College: "Fire & Roses is an extremely well-written, carefully researched, and utterly absorbing account of the nativist attack on the Ursuline convent in 1834."

Dr. Schultz is also the editor of a new collection of essays, Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture, published by Purdue University Press. She was inducted as a faculty member into the Salem State College Chapter, Phi Kappa Phi, in April 1999.

Go to the Fire and Roses Website.