Ella Hadacek

Ella Hadacek is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Notre Dame whose research sits at the intersection of religious history and the study of women and gender. Her dissertation, "Going to Rome: British and American Women’s Conversion to Catholicism, 1840-1914" explores how Protestant women’s conversions challenge scholarly depiction of Catholic laywomen as pious, passive, and disinterested in the outside world. "Going to Rome" argues that these convert women—empowered by superior education and social-standing—used Catholicism to make sense of their place in the world and found avenues to agency and authority denied them in their respective nation states.

 

More broadly, Hadacek’s research interests include cultural memory, labor history, and Catholic women’s involvement in Progressive reforms like Prohibition, the settlement movement, and suffrage. Her second project considers Catholic women’s role in labor movements and reform in the nineteenth century. An article from this project, titled “Doubly Intolerable: Gender, Union Busting, and the Fear of Catholic Power in the Loeb Affair, 1915-1917” was published by the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in July 2026. An earlier version of this article received the Vincent P. DeSantis Prize from the University of Notre Dame.

 

Hadacek’s archival research in the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy has been made possible by generous support from several institutions. Hadacek received the Henry F. May Research Fellowship from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History in 2024, and she was a 2025-2026 recipient of a Michael J. Garanzini, S.J. Fellowship from Loyola University of Chicago and a 2025-2026 New England Regional Fellowship Consortium fellowship. In fall 2025, Hadacek was a Rome Dissertation Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Rome, where she undertook archival research at the Vatican. In spring 2026, Hadacek served as the Graduate Teaching Fellow for Notre Dame London, where she designed and taught a seminar on English Women’s History. Her dissertation research has also received support from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

 

Hadacek also serves as a Cambridge University Press editorial assistant for Modern American History, and she is a 2026-2027 Graduate Fellow at the Nanovic Institute.

 

Hadacek holds a B.A. in History from Northwest Nazarene University and M.A. in History from Baylor University, where she was the recipient of Baylor University’s prestigious Guittard Fellowship in recognition of outstanding first-year graduate students