Susan Kingsley Kent is a professor emerita in Arts & Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies.[1] Her specialty is British History, with a focus on gender, culture, imperialism, and politics.[1] Kent has authored Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, as well as Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 and Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 in addition to other books. She has also co-authored books, including The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria with Misty Bastian and Marc Matera.[1]

Susan Kingsley Kent
Occupation(s)Professor and author
Academic background
Alma materBrandeis University
Academic work
DisciplineBritish History
Sub-disciplineGender, culture, imperialism, and politics
InstitutionsUniversity of Colorado Boulder
Notable worksMaking Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain
Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914
Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990
The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria
Websitewww.colorado.edu/history/susan-kent

Biography

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Kent completed her Ph.D. in comparative history at Brandeis University.[1] She was a Susan B. Anthony postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester.[2]

In 2015, she was named an Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado Boulder.[1]

Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain

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Published in 1993, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain is described by Birgitte Soland in Signs as "primarily concerned with understanding the remarkable shift in feminist thinking about women and gender that occurred in the course of the war", with the analysis focused "on the language with which women, the war, and the relationship between the sexes were described in the press, popular literature, feminist publications, government propaganda, and personal narratives during and after the war years."[3] In Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Susan D. Pennybacker writes, "Kent explores the transformation in the relationships between men and women, among women, and in the dominant feminist understandings of sexuality and gender. There is little Kent sees as static; most ideas about these issues appear to change between 1914 and 1918."[4]

Ellen Ross writes in the Journal of Social History, "Kent views interwar feminists in dialogue with other kinds of culture- and policy-makers who helped to structure their logic and to limit their vocabulary. Making Peace thus surveys an enormous amount of material, from feminists' correspondence and newspapers to wartime memoirs of all kinds, and discusses it compellingly."[5] In The English Historical Review, Janet Howarth writes, "The use of sexual images in war propaganda made conflict between the sexes, and sexual disorder, metaphors for war itself - hence the search for harmony between men and women became in its turn a metaphor for 'making peace.'"[6]

The Women's War of 1929

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Kent co-authored The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria with Misty Bastian and Marc Matera, which was published in 2011. In African Studies Review, Saheed Aderinto writes that the book, which focuses on what was known as the "Aba Women's Riot", "provides one of the most detailed and multidimensional accounts of the circumstances that led to those events and their impact on the African-colonial encounter."[7] According to Chima J. Korieh, writing for The American Historical Review, "the authors show the process through which Eastern Nigerian women infused indigenous ideology in resistance not just against British imperialism, but also against changing gender dynamics that increasingly identified women and the majority of ordinary people as subordinate to the British."[8] In The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Andrew E. Barnes writes, "The thread that holds the work together is a shared concern to illustrate what the authors see as the oppression of the Igbo women as women."[9]

Selected works

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  • Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (Routledge, 1987)[10]
  • Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton University Press, 1993)[11]
  • Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 (Routledge, 1999)[12]
  • Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 (MacMillan, 2009)[13]
  • The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (MacMillan, 2011) (with Misty Bastian and Marc Matera)
  • Gender and History (MacMillan, 2012)[14]
  • The Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012)[15]
  • Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660-1980 (Routledge, 2015) (with Myles Osborne)[16][17]
  • Queen Victoria: Gender and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2016)
  • A New History of Britain: Four Nations and an Empire (Oxford University Press, 2016)[18]
  • The Global 1930s (Routledge, 2017) (with Marc Matera)
  • Gender: A World History (Oxford University Press, 2020)[19]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e "Susan Kent". University of Colorado Boulder. 2 October 2019. Retrieved 7 August 2022.
  2. ^ Kent, Susan Kingsley (July 1988). "The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism". Journal of British Studies. 27 (3). Cambridge University Press: 232–253. doi:10.1086/385912. JSTOR 175664. S2CID 145470941. Retrieved 7 August 2022.
  3. ^ Soland, Birgitte (Winter 1996). "Reviewed Works: Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 by Barbara Alpern Engel; Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 by Mary Louise Roberts; Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain by Susan Kingsley Kent". Signs. 21 (2). The University of Chicago Press: 502–506. doi:10.1086/495085. JSTOR 3175083. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  4. ^ Pennybacker, Susan D. (Winter 1995). "Reviewed Works: From Liberal to Labour with Women's Suffrage: The Story of Catherine Marshall by Jo Vellacott; Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Europe by Susan Kingsley Kent". Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies. 27 (4): 711–714. doi:10.2307/4052584. JSTOR 4052584. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  5. ^ Ross, Ellen (Summer 1995). "Reviewed Work: Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain by Susan Kingsley Kent". Journal of Social History. 28 (4). Oxford University Press: 932–935. doi:10.1353/jsh/28.4.932. JSTOR 3788617. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  6. ^ Howarth, Janet (June 1996). "Book Review: Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and History. Theory and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 143 pp". The English Historical Review. 111 (442). Oxford University Press: 799–800. doi:10.1093/ehr/CXI.442.799. JSTOR 577071. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  7. ^ Aderinto, Saheed (December 2015). "The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria by Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian, Susan Kingsley Kent". African Studies Review. 58 (3). Cambridge University Press: 237–239. doi:10.1017/asr.2015.88. JSTOR 24805892. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  8. ^ Korieh, Chima J. (February 2015). "Reviewed Work: The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria by Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian, Susan Kingsley Kent". The American Historical Review. 120 (1): 374–375. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.1.374. JSTOR 43696539. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  9. ^ Barnes, Andrew E. (2014). "Reviewed Work: The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria by Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian, Susan Kingsley Kent". The International Journal of African Historical Studies. 47 (2): 366–367. JSTOR 24393425. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  10. ^ Reviews of Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914
  11. ^ Sohn, Anne-Marie (February 1999). "Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace. The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain". Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 54 (1): 139–140. doi:10.1017/S039526490004659X. S2CID 163426518. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  12. ^ Reviews of Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990
  13. ^ Reviews of Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931
  14. ^ Tovar, Marianela (July 2013). "Book Review: Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and History. Theory and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 143 pp". Historiografías. 6: 171–175. ISSN 2174-4289. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  15. ^ Coe, Natalie (February 2014). "The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919, A Brief History with Documents". World History Connected. 11 (1): 5 – via Education Research Complete.
  16. ^ Krishnan, Madhu (Summer 2017). "Reviewed Works: Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660–1980 by Myles Osborne and Susan Kingsley Kent; Heroic imperialists in Africa: The promotion of British and French colonial heroes, 1870–1939 by Berny Sèbe". Victorian Studies. 59 (4): 700–703. doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.59.4.24. JSTOR 10.2979/victorianstudies.59.4.24. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
  17. ^ Everill, Bronwen (2017). "Myles Osborne and Susan Kingsley Kent. Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660—1980". Journal of British Studies. 56 (2). Cambridge University Press: 440–441. doi:10.1017/jbr.2017.50.
  18. ^ Muldoon, Andrew (2018). "Stephanie Barczewski, et al. Britain since 1688: A Nation in the World; Susan Kingsley Kent. A New History of Britain since 1688: Four Nations and an Empire". Journal of British Studies. 57 (2). Cambridge University Press: 404–405. doi:10.1017/jbr.2018.26.
  19. ^ Reviews of Gender: A World History
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