Excellence Award

Dr. Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, Grad ’99
Mount Joy, Pa.

While earning her doctorate in history, Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen spent her summers working in the Marquette Archives and entered the building under a banner that read, “To the Greater Glory of God.” Those words “became my guide for how and why I began my work as a teacher and scholar,” she says.

During that time, she worked with archivist Phil Runkel, sorting the correspondence of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. “I went through boxes and boxes and boxes of letters and cards from people including Thomas Merton and Robert Kennedy,” she recalls. “You can imagine the thrill.”

Thinking about Day’s work on behalf of the poor shaped Jessica’s own scholarship in British history, which focuses on poor women in the Victorian era. Her very first book was Victorian Women: Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital (Continuum/Bloomsbury 2012), and she has continued to study and write about archived documents from the hospital.

After Marquette, Jessica taught history at Oklahoma City Community College (1999-2005), the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) (2005-2021), where she remains professor emerita, and the University of Maryland Global Campus (2005-2024). At UCO she also held administrative roles including assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

Jessica says she is grateful for Dennis Downey, Grad ’81, who facilitated her application to Marquette, as well as members of Marquette’s history department and the late Rev. Father Thaddeus J. Burch, dean of the graduate school. She also holds gratitude for “my husband, my parents, siblings, and friends who have walked with me since I graduated in spring 1999,” she says. “I have been blessed.”

Fun Facts:

Jessica is a trained chef who graduated from The Greenbrier culinary program in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

What is one of your favorite Marquette memories?

I will never forget that during the first week of school in January 1993, the administration deemed it necessary to hold classes even though there was a -45-degree wind chill in the air!