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Sister Lucille Claire Thibodeau, p.m., PhD

2nd December 2020

is a Sister of the Presentation of Mary, an international congregation of Roman Catholic women religious. She is Professor Emerita of English and Writer-in-Residence at Rivier University (NH, USA). She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, French, and Medieval Latin literatures) from Harvard University (1990). She has been an invited contributor to Continuum (ed. Justus George Lawler) and to the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (ed. David Noel Freedman).  A Fellow of the American Council on Education, she is a former President of Rivier University (1997-2001). Her biography of Rivier’s founder, Crucible and Charism, was published in 2009 by Hollis Publishing. More recently, having become aware of the plight of factory farmed animals, she has focused her research on ethical and theological questions raised by animal suffering. In 2017, she was invited as an expert signatory, one of 200 worldwide, to address an open letter on industrial animal farming to the Director-General of the World Health Organization. Her latest publication is “‘All Creation Groans’: The Lives of Factory Farmed Animals in the United States” in Ethical Vegetarianism and Veganism, ed. Andrew and Clair Linzey (Routledge, 2019). She recently co-authored a chapter on animal ethics for a textbook by Joseph M. Forte, PhD., entitled Moral Issues and Movies: An Introduction to Ethical Theories and Issues Through the Lens of Film (available for course adoption in 2021). In Spring 2020, she gave an upper-level undergraduate course, “Animals, Justice, and Responsibility,” the first such course to be offered at Rivier University. Her goal is to create an undergraduate concentration in Animal Studies. In concert with animal activists, she remains involved in legislative activity on behalf of animals. On a personal note, for 21 years she was a caregiver and legal, financial, and medical advocate for a severely brain-injured person. She has brought the same level of commitment to adopting and caring for rescue, stray, and feral cats suffering from a variety of life-threatening ailments.