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Jamie Gianoutsos, Ph.D., is a scholar of early modern European and Atlantic History (1500-1850), who joined the Mount faculty in 2013. She researches, teaches, and supervises students in early modern British history; early modern European culture and intellectual history; gender history; and the Anglo-American tradition of political thought. Her first book, The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603-1660 (Cambridge UP, 2020) won the Istvan Hont Prize for best book in intellectual history. Gianoutsos' forthcoming book with Penguin Press UK / University of California Press US, In Rome's Long Shadow, explores the long republican tradition for broad audiences. From 2016-2023, Gianoutsos also created and served as the Director of the Mount Office of Competitive Fellowships.
Read more about Dr. Gianoutsos at jamiegianoutsos.com.
In Rome's Long Shadow: How the Classical Tradition Shaped the Modern World (Allen Lane 2026 / University of California Press 2027)
Julius Caesar, Lucretia, Cincinnatus, Augustus, the Gracchi brothers: Roman figures have had an extraordinary influence on modern republics from the United States to France. Historian Jamie Gianoutsos traces the Roman republic and its afterlives through the revolutionary birth of these modern republics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal how ancient ideas of liberty, virtue, and corruption shaped the political imagination of a new age. Moving from stories of tyranny and collapse in ancient Rome to moments of crisis in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, Gianoutsos uncovers recurring patterns in the rise and fall of republics. Through vivid portraits of figures from Cato to the Brutuses to the revolutionaries of the United States, Britain, France, and Haiti who consciously cast themselves as modern Romans, she offers a fresh and critical assessment of the strategies citizens pursued in their struggle to build lasting republican institutions. As Gianoutsos shows, modern activists in this long republican tradition defended new freedoms—of the press, expression, conscience, and equality before the law—as a bulwark against corruption, decline, and tyranny. With verve and deep historical insight, Gianoutsos argues that by revisiting the past, we gain a clearer view of ourselves—and of the challenges republics continue to face today.
The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603-1660. Studies in Early Modern British History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Awarded the Istvan Hont Book Prize for best work in intellectual history in 2020.
Through stories of lustful and incestuous rulers, of republican revolution and of unnatural crimes against family, seventeenth-century Englishmen imagined the problem of political tyranny through the prism of classical history. This fuelled debates over the practices of their own kings, the necessity of revolution, and the character of English republican thought. The Rule of Manhood explores the dynamic and complex languages of tyranny and masculinity that arose through these classical stories and their imaginative appropriation. Discerning the neglected connection between concepts of power and masculinity in early Stuart England, the book shows both how stories of ancient tyranny were deployed in the dialogue around monarchy and rule between 1603 and 1660 and the extent to which these shaped English classical republican thought. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary printed texts, The Rule of Manhood weaves together the histories of politics and manhood to make a bold claim: that the fundamental purpose of English republicanism was not liberty or virtue, but the realisation of manhood for its citizens.
“This is an ambitious and ground-breaking book, carefully argued and built on a lot of fresh evidence…. [S]he has cast a flood of light on some long-neglected areas and helped to redraw the map of seventeenth-century political culture.” ~ David Norbrook, Global Intellectual History (Feb. 2023): 338-41.
“The Rule of Manhood is clearly written, forcefully argued, and consistently thought provoking. It adds significantly to recent work on early modern English politics that has (finally) taken gender seriously as a category of analysis. And by pushing us to think about “cultural origins” —about the processes that make radical political change thinkable—Gianoutsos makes an important case for reorienting research into the long-term causes of the English Revolution.” ~ Alastair Bellany, American Historical Review (March 2023): 439-40.
See also Gregory Chaplin, Journal of British Studies (2023): 514-16; Ann Hughes, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52.4 (Spring 2022): 610-11; Emelye Keyser, Renaissance Quarterly 76.1 (Spring 2023): 286-87. Gaby Mahlberg, The Seventeenth Century 36.5 (2021): 858-60.
“To What Should He Swear? Coronation Oaths and King Charles III,” Broadsides, official blog of the North American Conference on British Studies, April 2023.
“Interviews with Leading Intellectual Historians: Dr. Jamie Gianoutsos,” with Selma Sondern, Institute of Intellectual History, St Andrews, June 2022
“Marx Madness: Karl Marx Explains Marxism and his ‘Communist Manifesto,’” First Person Philosophy animated educational videos (running time 21:55), November 2021, with Dr. Mike Miller.
“Interview: The Rule of Manhood, New Work in Intellectual History,” with Megan Chance, Institute of Intellectual History, St Andrews, November 2021
“Were Republics Designed Only for Men?” Association of Marshall Scholars Public Presentation, December 2020.
“Tales of the Unexpected: Reflections on a Journey of Engaged Learning,” Baylor Arts & Sciences magazine, April 2018.
Invited Lectures
“Can Women Have a Machiavellian Moment? Gender and Citizenship in Early Modern Republicanism.” Early Modern History Research Seminar, Trinity College Dublin, October 2025.
“History, Histories, and the Language of Republicanism, Reconsidered,” Machiavellian Moment at 50, American Historical Association presidential panel, January 2025.
“Newsbooks, Liberty of Conscience, and the Freedom of Speech in Early Modern England.” The History Seminar, The Johns Hopkins University, March 2023.
“Free Speech, News, and Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century England.” Istvan Hont Memorial Lecture, Institute of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews, May 2022.
“Does Partisan News Destroy Democracy?” Ducharme Veritas Lecture, Mount St. Mary’s University, March 2022.
“English News Culture and Classical Republican Thought in the 1640s.” Oxford Political Thought Seminar, New College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, November 2021.
Conference Presentations
“Discourses of Republican Bodies and Body Politics in the Medical and Political Writings of Marchamont Nedham.” International Society of Intellectual Historians, Edinburgh, September 2023.
“Conceptualizing News, Free Speech, and Republics in the English Revolution.” North American Conference on British Studies, Chicago, November 2022.
“Were Republics Designed Only for Men?” Association of Marshall Scholars Presentation, December 2020.
Panel Commentator, Body, Personhood and Family Relations in Early Modern England, 1600-1820. North American Conference on British Studies, Vancouver, October 2019.
“The Tyrannical Womb: Hereditary Monarchy and the Maternal Imagination in Seventeenth-Century England.” Mid-Atlantic Conference for British Studies, Maryland, April 2018.
“Loyalty to a Nero? Publicising Puritan Persecution in the 1630s.” Loyalty to the British Monarchs, c. 1400-1688, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, January 2018.
“Marchamont Nedham and the Masculine Republic.” North American Conference on British Studies, Washington DC, November 2016.
Invited Commentator for Mary E. Fissell, “Bodies that Work: Three Perspectives on the History of Maternity,” the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, December 2015.
“Honor, Valor, and Revolution: The Masculinity of Junius Brutus in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.” Sixteenth Century Conference, Vancouver, Canada, October 2015.
“‘So much power and piety in one’: Oliver Cromwell and the Question of Masculinity.” Mid-Atlantic Conference of British Studies, Baltimore, March 2015.
“A Funeral for a Hair of Nero's Mistress: George Chapman's Criticism of Monarchy.” Western Conference on British Studies, Calgary, Canada, October 2014.
“John Milton, Divorce, and the Republican Household.” Sixteenth Century Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2013.
“A Chaste Virginia: Tyranny and the Corruption of Law in Jacobean England.” Ancients and Moderns: the 81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians, London, United Kingdom, July 2012.