Dr. Lisa M. Toland

JWHC Associate Director
Associate Professor of Humanities and History

Lisa M. Toland (B.A., Indiana Wesleyan University; M.A., Miami University of Ohio; M.St., University of Oxford; D.Phil., University of Oxford) is proudly and originally from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is also an Anglophile having lived in England for five years. She currently resides in Marion, Indiana, and frequently travels to visit family and friends. She has worked extensively in residence life with American students studying overseas.

Lisa researches the social, legal and economic experiences of early modern English families. She focuses in particular on women's legal and economic situations, as well as the rituals of death, burial and commemoration. When in England she explores back corners of tiny forgotten parish churches and the lives of the people buried and memorialized in them. She is busy revising several articles for publication on testamentary burial requests by West Country elites, the economic independence of elite single women in eighteenth-century Somerset and the role of sibling correspondence in familial and individual identity formation.

Lisa spoke at the 2009 IWU Academic Convocation on the Wesley brothers and the "life of the mind." She has most recently been published in Christianity Today. Lisa teaches Wisdom, Justice, and Culture through the Ages, the History of England and research tutorials on women in eighteenth-century England and early Methodist female preachers.

E-mail: lisa.toland@indwes.edu