Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History Jessica Hower had her article, titled “Teaching Pirates: The Perils and Promises of Using Piracy in Pedagogy,” published in The History Teacher, Volume 59, Number 3 (May 2026). The piece, which reflects on her experiences teaching in Southwestern’s FYS program, is also the cover inspiration for the issue, titled “The Craft of Teaching: Novel Approaches to History.” More information is available here.

Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History Jessica Hower gave an invited talk titled “‘Bring[ing] Up the Bodies’: Queenship in History, Fiction, and the Public” at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

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.