Gender and Women’s History
Learn more about the encyclopedia
Meet the Editorial Board
Letter from the Editor in Chief
About the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History
With today’s overabundance of information, and misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed when trying to identify what’s trustworthy, what’s up-to-date, and what’s accurate.
Oxford University Press will launch the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History to meet this challenge. We will publish long-form, peer-reviewed overview articles covering race, ethnicity, and cultural identity, family, bodies, emotions, and sex, religion and spirituality, historical themes and theory, literature, law and human rights, imperialism and war, and politics and activism, among many other topics.
Find information about the scholars who will shape the content of this exciting new resource.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History is part of the larger online Oxford Research Encyclopedias (OREs). OREs are dynamic digital encyclopedias which are continuously updated by a community of leading scholars and researchers.
Join the Oxford Research Encyclopedias Community
Oxford would like to invite you to join an engaged community of authors, scholars, librarians, and students to build a better reference platform of enduring academic values. Whether you wish to contribute, provide insights and recommendations, or simply ask a question, email us at genderandwomenshistory.ore@oup.com to connect with the editorial team. We look forward to hearing from you.
Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
AMANDA CAPERN
Amanda Capern is a specialist in early modern women's and gender history. Her books include The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe (2020) and Women and the Land, 1500-1900 (2019). Other publications include ‘Maternity and Justice in the Early Modern Court of Chancery’ (2019), ‘Visions of Monarchy and Magistracy in Women’s Political Writing, 1649-1670’ (2018) and ‘Mary Hays and the Imagined Female Communities of Early Modern Europe’ (2017). She is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship between 2019 and 2021 and a Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library in 2017. She is currently working on gender and the institutions of law and the family.
Editorial Board
JAIMIE CRUMLEY
Dr. Jaimie D. Crumley (she, her) is an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies Divisions at the University of Utah. She is a Black feminist intellectual historian whose research interrogates the historical entanglements of race, gender, and religion in eighteenth and nineteenth-century New England. Dr. Crumley is currently engaged in two research projects. The first is a study of the people of African and Indigenous descent who participated in the religious, social, and cultural life at Christ Church in Boston (more commonly known as the Old North Church) from 1723 to 1860. She argues that African and Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the rituals of Episcopal Old North produced trans-Atlantic ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality that inform contemporary ideologies of the same. Her second research project is about New England’s Black women abolitionists, theologians, sisters, and friends from 1770 to 1870. It argues that Black New England women remade Christian theology to articulate their desire to abolish slavery, sexism, and racism. Dr. Crumley is at work on her first scholarly monograph called, “We Will Live: Black Christian Feminists in the Age of Revolutions,” which tells the stories of Black Christian abolitionist women who, from the Revolutionary Era through the Civil War Era, interpreted the Bible for themselves to produce theories of social liveliness that allowed them to thrive despite the racial and sexual violence that permeated their daily lives. Dr. Crumley regularly teaches undergraduate courses on African American Studies, Feminist Historiography, Black Feminisms, Race, Gender, and Religion, and Black Women’s History. Media outlets, including NBC Boston and The Boston Globe, have covered her work as a public historian who is committed to revealing and responding to the intersections between power, religion, and political life in early American history.
KATIE BARCLAY
Katie Barclay is Professor and ARC Future Fellow, Macquarie University. She writes widely in the fields of the history of emotions, gender and family life.
KIRSI STJERNA
Rev. Dr. Kirsi Stjerna, Ph.D., First Lutheran, Los Angeles/Southwest Synod Professor of Lutheran History and Theology, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary (Berkeley) of California Lutheran University. Docent, Theological Faculty, Helsinki University, Finland. Core Doctoral Faculty, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. Publications: Lutheran Theology: A Grammar of Faith (2021), (ed.) Women Reformers of Early Modern Europe: Profiles, Texts, and Contexts (2022), Women and the Reformation (2009), (co-authored with Brooks Schramm), Martin Luther, the Bible, and the Jewish People (2012), (co-gen. ed., contributor), The Annotated Luther, 6 vols. (2015-17).
UTSA RAY
Utsa Ray teaches History at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her book Culinary Culture in Colonial India was published by Cambridge University Press. She has also published in journals like Modern Asian Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review and South Asian History and Culture.
EVALEILA PESARAN
Dr Evaleila Pesaran is a Fellow and Senior College Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Her research explores the politics of domination and resistance in modern Iran, with a particular focus on ideas of economic independence, the theory and practice of anti-imperialism, and relations between state and society. She is the author of Iran’s Struggle for Economic Independence: Reform and Counter-Reform in the Post-Revolutionary Era (London, 2011) as well as publications in Iranian Studies and the Review of International Studies.
Letter from the Editor in Chief
It is an enormous pleasure to be launching the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History in the year that marks the fortieth anniversary of Joan Wallach Scott’s groundbreaking article, ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis’. Scott built on the new women’s history of the twentieth century that was linked to political movements for social justice worldwide. Women’s history has always been linked to a desire for gender equality. Qiu Jin was interested in the same issues of gender oppression in her 1904 Address to the women of China as Christine de Pizan in The Book of the City of Ladies of 1405. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History proudly follows in this scholarly tradition of placing the lived experience of women and the nature of gender and power at the heart of historical enquiry.
The vision of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History is to bring new and cutting-edge theoretical models and research to a truly global history of gender and women in an accessible online format. Topics include regional and international political activism, the material world of gendered culture, and gender and the creative arts. The essays collectively seek inclusion of all voices and perspectives. The histories of Black and First Nations women, LGBTQIA+ and Trans histories, are brought front and centre to drive epistemological change in the feminist genre of historical writing. One objective is to create an open, inclusive and expanding research conversation about the nature of historical gender and showcase new theories about fluidity and identity.
Historical research is undergoing a transformation. New histories emerge from the archives as lost voices are found in a digital age of historical scholarship. Methods such as catalogue-tagging and AI for data mining and text creation make it a uniquely exciting time for historians of women and gender. Regional and international knowledge gaps are filled in women’s history and new categories of historical analysis arise alongside an expanded lexicon of gender and sexual identity. The amazing and growing international and interdisciplinary team of scholars of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History push at the boundaries of knowledge in a very dynamic field. It is our collaborative aim to offer fresh perspectives alongside accounts of older histories and historiographies to enhance and shape the field of gender and women’s history.
Amanda Capern
Editor-in-Chief
University of Hull
