Elizabeth Ewan
Campus: Guelph
Office: 1016 MacKinnon Extension
Email: eewan@uoguelph.ca
My current area of research is medieval and early modern Scottish gender history, focusing on the period 1450-1600; I have supervised several MA and PhD theses in this area, as well as others in more the more general area of medieval and early modern Scotland.
My early work, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 1990, 1992), examined the social history of fourteenth-century towns. Since the late 1990s, I have been working with others to research the history of pre-modern Scottish women and gender. This has resulted in two essay collections, Women in Scotland c.1100-c.1750 (Tuckwell Press, 1999) co-edited with Maureen Meikle, and Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Ashgate Press, 2008, co-edited with Janay Nugent (PhD, Tri-U/Guelph, 2005). A large-scale collaborative project, involving over 250 contributors, was published as The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press, 2006, 2007), co-edited with S. Innes, S. Reynolds and R. Pipes.
Major research projects underway include
- a study of gender and physical and verbal assault in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland, using the legal records of town courts;
- a biography of an Edinburgh woman, Alison Rough (c.1480-1535);
- a website, WISH (Women in Scottish History) which offers a bibliography, primary source material and other resources for those interested in exploring the history of Scottish women from the medieval period to the twenty-first century (www.uoguelph.ca/wish) The website, in particular, is intended to provide opportunities for graduate students to contribute, but external research funding for other projects has also provided opportunities for graduate student employment.