Associate Dean of the Faculty & Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published the chapter, “Utopia’s Empire: Thomas More’s Text and the Early British Atlantic World, c. 1510-1625,” in Thomas More’s Utopia, edited by Phil Withington and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). The piece explores the broad context in which one of the most famous–and incompletely understood–books of the sixteenth century were written and read, arguing that doing so allows us to come to a fuller understanding of the nature, significance, and utility of Utopia and of the empire created alongside it.

Associate Dean of the Faculty & Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower’s book, Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), co-edited with Valerie Schutte, won the best collaborative project award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Hower co-wrote the introduction and single-authored a chapter in the volume, the first of three books on the queen that she has written in the past two years.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published the book Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I. It is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s internationally renowned “Queenship and Power” series and features 11 original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Hower coedited the book with Valerie Schutte and also single-authored both the introduction as well as the chapter, “’As the Kinges of this Realme her Most Noble Progenitours’: Historical (Self-)Fashioning at the Accession Moment.” The volume is available on the publisher’s website here and on Amazon.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper entitled, “‘The recovery of her ancestral and hereditary right’: History, Memory, and Female Succession in the Mid-Tudor Era,” at the Female Succession in Late Medieval and Early Modern Monarch—Contestation, Conflict, and Compromise Conference at Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, 24-26 May 2023.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower gave the keynote lecture for the Queen Elizabeth I Society at their annual meeting in conjunction with the international South Central Renaissance Studies Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, 27-29 April 2023. Hower’s talk was entitled “A Tale of Two Pales: Dublin and Calais in the Tudor Imperial World” and served as a transition of sorts from my first monograph into a new stream of research on the once-English, now-French city and its history, myth, and heritage from the sixteenth century to the present.