Professor Elizabeth Ewan

Visiting Professor

Biography

• email: history@uhi.ac.uk

Most of my career has been spent at the Centre for Scottish Studies, University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, where I was Professor and University Research Chair in History and Scottish Studies. My main area of interest is the lives of ordinary medieval Scots. My PhD (Edinburgh University) used both historical and archaeological evidence to study the lives of medieval townspeople and resulted in Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland (1990).

Since then, I have focused on the lives of medieval women and families, and have co-edited several essay collections, including Women in Scotland c.1100-1750 (1999), Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (2008); Children and Youth in Premodern Scotland (2015). I am especially keen to promote the study of Scottish women’s and gender history, through working with groups such as Women’s History Scotland and supervising many postgraduate theses in the field. In 2007, I co-edited The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (expanded and revised edition 2018) which included the lives of over 1000 women from the medieval period to 2004. My recent research has focused on pre-modern gender history, particularly on the gendered nature of defamation and assault in medieval and early modern Scotland.  I am also interested in the history of masculinity in Scotland and co-edited Nine Centuries of Man: Manhood and Masculinity in Scottish History (2018). I look forward to working on future collaborative projects with staff and students at UHI.

Professor Elizabeth Ewan has been Visiting Professor to the Centre since 2020. In 2021 she gave an excellent talk A Brewing Storm: Alewives in sixteenth-century Inverness in our History Talks Live series of online seminars.