gemma.allen@open.ac.uk
I read History as an undergraduate at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. After working as a researcher for historical TV documentaries (including the RTS award nominated Blitz Spirit), I returned to Oxford for postgraduate study, receiving my doctorate in 2010 from Jesus College. Whilst completing my doctorate, I held a one-year lectureship at Lincoln College, Oxford, and for the following two years I was a lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford. I joined the OU as a lecturer in early modern history in 2012.
I teach and examine for the following modules:
A200: Exploring History: Medieval to Modern 1400-1900;
A218: Medicine and Society in Europe 1500-1930.
I welcome PhD proposals in particular on early modern women and gender, sixteenth-century political and religious culture, as well as early modern correspondence.
My research centres on the political, religious and cultural history of later sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England and particularly the study of early modern women.
My new book, which developed out of my doctoral thesis, explores the lives of five remarkable sixteenth-century women: Mildred Cooke Cecil (1526-1589), Anne Cooke Bacon (1528-1610), Margaret Cooke Rowlett (c.1533-1558), Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell (c. 1540-1609) and Katherine Cooke Killigrew (c. 1542-1583). Part of the select group of Tudor women allowed access to a formal education, the Cooke sisters were also well-connected through their marriages to influential Elizabethan politicians. Drawing particularly on their own writings, this book reconstructs for the first time the sisters' humanist education and reveals the extent of their religious and political agency. The extensive extant correspondence of one of the Cooke sisters, Lady Anne Bacon, is the subject of my forthcoming edition for the Camden series. My current research project looks more widely at the political activities of early modern Englishwomen.
I am a member of the OU GiTH (Gender in the Humanities) research group.
The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (In press: MUP, 2013).
The Correspondence of Lady Anne Bacon, c. 1552-1610 (Forthcoming: Camden Society Publications/CUP).
‘Women as Counsellors in Sixteenth-Century England: The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon and Lady Elizabeth Russell’ in J. Daybell and A. Gordon (eds), Women and Letters in Early Modern Britain: Gendered Rhetorics and Networks in Renaissance Correspondence (Forthcoming: Ashgate).
‘“a briefe and plaine declaration”: Lady Anne Bacon’s 1564 Translation of the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae’, in P. Hardman and A. Lawrence-Mathers (eds), Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture (Boydell and Brewer, 2010), pp. 62-76.
Review of Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge, 2009) in The English Historical Review, CXXVI, 521 (2011), pp. 934-936.
Review of Melissa Franklin Harkrider’s Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy (Boydell and Brewer, 2008) in The English Historical Review, CXXIV, 510 (2009), pp. 1164-5.
Follow this link for details of my forthcoming podcast series.
See also Open Research Online for further details of Gemma Allen’s research publications.
