In the 17th and 18th centuries, more than 300 Jesuits served as missionaries in colonial New France, which stretched from eastern Canada and Maine to the Great Lakes region. Even as they spread Catholic doctrines and rituals in ways that were creatively adapted to Native American linguistic and cultural forms, these missionaries were also proactive agents of an aspiring French-imperial state and labored to import across the Atlantic the culture of an elite, urban French society to which they remained closely tied. In her talk, Bronwen McShea will provide a revisionist assessment of the mission famously associated with canonized saints such as the martyred Jesuit Isaac Jogues and the Algonquin-Mohawk convert Kateri Tekakwitha. She will draw from her new book Apostles of Empire, recently published by the University of Nebraska Press in its series “France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization.”