My first book--Habits of Conquest: Nuns, Labor, and the U.S. Settler Empire--is scheduled for release with the University of North Carolina Press in 2027. This book offers an imbricated history of religion and colonialism, arguing that Catholic nuns who went west to conquer not for the United States, not for money, not for self-actualization, but for God became key actors in the imperial settlement of the U.S. West. This book is a history of nuns’ labors and stories in the nineteenth-century West. By critically reading the stories nuns told about themselves, I argue for seeing the Catholic Church as a settler institution, ambiguously embedded in the U.S. settler project and also working at other scales than the nation. Habits of Conquest shows that nuns’ Catholic storytelling is complicit in justifying the violence of U.S. conquest, even as it shows how U.S. efforts to conquer were more diffuse and uneven than is often remembered. Habits of Conquest shifts the historiography from a story centered on eastern, urban immigrants facing anti-catholicism to a church at both the margins and the vanguard of U.S. efforts to establish itself as a continental nation in the nineteenth-century.