Nolan, Julian (Julia) (c.1612–1701), Dominican prioress, the daughter of Galway citizens Peter Nolan and Elizabeth Lynch, was probably born in Galway. Nothing is known about her upbringing or education. In 1644 she married a distant relative, Peter Nolan, but a year later, although they were reputed to have been happily married and quite wealthy, they separated by mutual consent and both subsequently joined the Dominican order. Julian entered the novitiate on 6 August 1646 and made her profession on 19 March 1647. Five and a half years later, she and another Dominican nun, Mary Lynch, left Galway for Bilbao, where they were received into the Convent of the Incarnation on 14 September 1652. Julian's vicar, the Rev. Gregory French, paid 4 reales a day for her upkeep from that date until 13 December, when she and Mary were incorporated into the community. King Philip IV of Spain paid 4,000 reales to the convent for their dowries. The Rev. John O'Heyne (qv), a Dominican who became well acquainted with Julian in Spain, remarked how ‘advancing from virtue to virtue, so amiable did she show herself to everyone, that all that religious community was rapt in love and admiration of her’ (O'Heyne, 161).
In 1686, a year after the catholic James II (qv) ascended the throne in England, she was asked by John Browne, provincial of the Irish Dominican province, to return to Ireland with a view to reestablishing a Dominican monastery in Galway. Accompanied by Mary Lynch and two Dominican priests, Sister Julian, who was then in her mid-seventies, departed from Bilbao on 30 November 1686. Eight days later they arrived in Galway, where they received a warm welcome from the city's catholic population. Sir John Kirwan, Galway's first catholic mayor for thirty years, gave the sisters his home, a large stone house in the city centre, built in the Jacobean style with a courtyard, as security for a loan of £300 which was never repaid. Sister Julian was appointed prioress and Sister Mary sub-prioress and they immediately established their community: in May 1688, their first novice was professed.
Despite the climate of mounting hostility towards catholics in the wake of the treaty of Limerick (1691), Sister Julian's community continued to function under strict enclosure, receiving fourteen girls to the habit until 1 May 1698, when legislation dispersing religious communities came into force. When her convent was seized, Sister Julian feared that the sisters, all of whom were clothed in secular dress, would scatter throughout the city. However, although deprived of their habit, the nuns were buoyed up by their prioress's resoluteness and adapted to life as a clandestine community. While the sisters were not bound by the banishment act (1697), Sister Julian considered relocating her community to France but was dissuaded from doing so by O'Heyne. She died in late 1701 and was interred in the Dominican cemetery alongside Claddagh church in Galway. In January 1702 she was succeeded as prioress by Sister Mary Lynch.