History Commons^™

Jewel Of Womanhood: A Feminist Reinterpretation Of Queen Katherine Howard, Holly K. Kizewski

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In 1540, King Henry VIII married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard. Less than two years later, the young queen was executed on charges of adultery. Katherine Howard has been much maligned by history, often depicted as foolish, vain, and outrageously promiscuous. Her few defenders often attempt to exonerate Katherine by claiming that she was chaste, innocent of the adultery charges brought against her, or a victim of rape. Both detractors and defenders usually reduce Katherine to her sexuality.

However, the surviving primary sources about Katherine reveal a more complex individual. In fact, examination of conduct books for young women of …

Teaching Postcolonial Literature In An Elite University: An Edinburgh Lecturer’S Perspective, Michelle Keown

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This reflective essay explores some of the pedagogical challenges I have faced in teaching postcolonial literature and theory at the University of Edinburgh. There are particular social dynamics at work at Edinburgh that make engaging with intersectionality, particularly in the context of colonialism and racism, a rather complex endeavor. Edinburgh is a Russell Group university, and our undergraduate constituency is overwhelmingly white, middle class and British, with a high proportion of students coming from British public-school backgrounds. Many of these students approach postcolonial writing with well-meaning liberal intentions, but often adopt what Graham Huggan (2001) would term an exoticizing perspective …

Mother Of A New World? Stereotypical Representations Of Black Women In Three Postapocalyptic Films, Karima K. Jeffrey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay explores three cinematic representations of Black matriarchs who play prophetic roles in redeeming humanity in the midst of apocalyptic change: Ika (Quest for Fire), Kee (Children of Men), and The Oracle (The Matrix trilogy). Not only do these courageous women resist the politics of domination, rebelling against a dying status quo, but they "give birth" to the leaders needed to rebuild a world in chaos and decay. One film ends with a pregnant woman rubbing her belly as she stands on the precipice of evolutionary change; another positions a mother and newborn adrift, waiting to be found by …

"Playthings Of A Historical Process": Prostitution In Spanish Society From The Restoration To The Civil War (1874-1939), Ann Kirkpatrick

Scripps Senior Theses

Spain underwent a series of tumultuous social and political changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prostitute women directly experienced these changes as fluctuations in their social and legal status within Spanish society. The years spanning from 1874 to 1931 are known as the Restoration, when the Bourbon monarchy was reinstalled under King Alfonso XII (1857-1885) after the crumbling of the First Spanish Republic (1873-1874). During this time, Spain experienced a period of growing nationalism and urbanization, and prostitution began to be interpreted as a threat to the nation in terms of public health and decency. Between 1923 …

Atatürk's Balancing Act: The Role Of Secularism In Turkey, Patrick G. Rear

Global Tides

The intersection of religion and politics in the form of a civil religion has been present since time immemorial. This paper looks specifically to the relationship between Turkey’s development of a secular civil religion after gaining independence and the advancing of women’s rights and democratic values. In examining the intersections of state and religion in a secular Islamic society, it draws parallels to the French civil religion as it came to be following the French Revolution. Though Atatürk and other secularists were strong forces in developing the civil religion, the paper also examines liberal democratic and conservative Islamic groups in …