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Jamie Gianoutsos, Ph.D., is a scholar of early modern Britain (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. She is currently under contract with Penguin Classics UK to write a book for academic and non-academic audiences on the classical republican tradition. She is also currently researching the history of newswriting in the Anglo-American tradition, and the role of the newspaper in the development of conceptions of popular sovereignty and central freedoms, including the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the freedom of the press. From 2016-2023, Gianoutsos also created and served as the Director of the Mount Office of Competitive Fellowships.
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.
“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.
In Rome’s Long Shadow: The Classical Tradition that Shaped the Modern World (under contract with Penguin Classics UK)
Brief Abstract: In Rome’s Long Shadow explores the most enduring stories of heroes and tyrants from the classical republican tradition and considers the profound influence of these stories and ideas on the republican revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, France, Haiti, and America.
Imprinting Liberty: Newspapers and the Development of Republican Thought in Early Modern Europe and America (academic monograph)
Brief Abstract: Imprinting Liberty examines the complex relationship between newswriting, republics, and religious liberty in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic world, arguing that the newspaper as a technology encouraged the development of more populist strands of republican thought and the idea that religious tolerationism, freedom of speech, and liberty of conscience should be guaranteed freedoms in modern republics.
Invited Lectures
“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.