Dr Claire Walker
Biography/ Background
Claire Walker completed her BA (Hons I) and PhD at the University of Western Australia. Before joining the University of Adelaide in 2008, she taught medieval and early modern history at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales.
Claire is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), and she is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Teaching Interests
Claire has taught courses ranging from the earliest centuries of the Common Era to the 20th century, but her main areas of teaching expertise lie in the medieval and early modern periods. She is particularly interested in the history of culture and religion and teaches the enormously popular HIST2069 Heresy and Witchcraft in Medieval Europe. However, as an early modernist, Claire is also fascinated by the momentous political, social, religious, and intellectual changes which occurred between the Black Death and the French Revolution and explores them in HIST2063 Early Modern Europe. She has also coordinated History’s first semester course HIST1105 Europe, Empire and the World, 1492-1914.
At Honours level Claire has taught courses on gender and religion and on religion and politics in early modern Europe. She is available to supervise honours and research higher degree theses in medieval and early modern religious, social and political history.
Research Interests
Claire is a scholar of early modern religion, gender and politics. She has written extensively about exiled English convents in France, the Southern Netherlands and Portugal in the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of an ARC funded project on moral panics, she considered the ways that fears about the threat Catholics posed church, state and society were represented in the media. Claire is currenting working on an ARC Centre for the History of Emotions project, 'Governing Emotion: The Affective family, the Press and the Law in Early Modern Britain', with Professor David Lemmings and Dr Katie Barclay; and she continues to research anti-Catholic fear in early modern England.
Publications
Books
(Ed. with David Lemmings), Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xi + 279.
(Ed.), The Admirable Life of the Holy Virgin S. Catharine of Bologna (1621), The Early Modern Englishwoman, Series I, Part 4, Vol. 1 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), xix + 394.
Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), xii + 247.
Book Chapters
'"When God shall restore them to their kingdoms": Nuns, Exiled Stuarts, and English Catholic Identity, 1660-1745', in Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith (eds), Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660-1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming, 2012).
'Continuity and Isolation: the Bridgettines of Syon in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', in E.A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion in England, c. 1400-1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010).
‘Remember Justice Godfrey’: The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panics in Seventeenth-century Media’ in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 117-38.
‘Priests, Nuns, Presses and Prayers: The Southern Netherlands and the Contours of English Catholicism’, in Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570-1720, (eds) Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop and Judith Pollmann (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 136-55.
‘Recusants, Daughters and Sisters in Christ: English Nuns and their Communities in the Seventeenth Century’, in Women, Identities and Political Cultures in Early Modern Europe, (eds) Susan Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 61-76.
‘Securing Souls or Telling Tales? The Politics of Cloistered Spirituality’, in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, (ed.) Cordula van Wyhe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 227-44.
‘Spiritual Property: The English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and the Dispute over the Baker Manuscripts’, in Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, (eds) N. Wright, M. Ferguson & A. R. Buck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 237-55.
‘Loyal and Dutiful Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart Politics’, in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, (ed.) James Daybell (Aldershot & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 228-42.
‘”Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter Writing in Early Modern English Convents’, in Early Modern Women Letter Writers 1450-1700, (ed.) James Daybell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 159-76.
Journal Articles
'"These Crumms of nuse": Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42-3 (2012), in press.
‘Prayer, Patronage and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 1-23.
‘Combining Martha and Mary: Gender and Work in Seventeenth-Century English Cloisters’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 30 (1999), 397-418.
Review Articles
‘”Going against some forcible wind”: Writing and Reform in Medieval and Early Modern Convents’, Journal of Women’s History, 21-1 (Spring 2009), 135-44.
‘Godliness, Sex and Propaganda: Gender in the Confessional Age’, Gender and History, 14 (2002), 138-42.
Other Publications
‘Margaret Clitherow’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
‘Dorothy Lawson’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
‘Margaret Radcliffe’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
‘Elizabeth Shirley’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
‘Jane Wiseman’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Entry last updated: Monday, 21 Nov 2011
