Associate Professor of History Jamie Gianoutsos, Ph.D., has been awarded the Istvan Hont Prize for the Best Book in Intellectual History for The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603-1660. In May she will deliver the Istvan Hont Memorial Lecture at the invitation of the Institute for Intellectual History, the organization that awards this prize.
The book, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History series, explores the importance of gender, especially masculinity, in anti-monarchy writings of the 17th century and in the republican tradition of thought. The series is a preeminent collection of established and emerging scholars whose research reveals valuable new perspectives on familiar subjects.
“For my field of study, I’m hopeful that scholars studying the history of monarchy and of our republican heritage will now recognize gender as fundamental to understanding the history of power, and that it will reshape the scholarly conversation accordingly,” Gianoutsos said in an interview in December 2020.
Gianoutsos’ research for this book has been shared in the classroom through elective courses she has offered on the politics of gender and the classical republican tradition. In the Origins of the West course, included in the core curriculum, she taught a unit on Greco-Roman masculinity.
Gianoutsos, who directs the Mount’s Office of Competitive Fellowships, joined the History Department as an assistant professor in 2014. She earned her B.A. from Baylor University. As a 2006 Marshall Scholar, she completed an M.A. in Renaissance literature from the Queen’s University of Belfast and an MPhil in political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. Upon returning to the U.S. in 2008, she completed a Ph.D. in history at the Johns Hopkins University through a George and Sylvia Kagan Graduate Fellowship and through generous grants including an IHR Mellon Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, Huntington Library Fellowship, and Charles Singleton Center Fellowship.
Elizabeth Boyle, C’19, a fellowships student during her time at the Mount, served as a research assistant for The Rule of Manhood before graduating. She is a social studies teacher at St. Maria Goretti High School in Hagerstown, Maryland. Another fellowships student, Daniel Majerowicz, C’20, helped Gianoutsos begin research for her second book project, tentatively titled The ‘Propagation of Liberty’: Marchamont Nedham and the Classical Republican Tradition. Majerowicz is currently a graduate student in the MLitt in Intellectual History program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Gianoutsos’ articles and book chapters have been published in the Renaissance Quarterly, the leading American journal of Renaissance studies, History of Education Quarterly, an international, peer-reviewed academic journal, and Reformation & Renaissance Review. Her book chapter, “Loyalty to a Nero? Publicising Puritan Persecution in the 1630s” was recently published in an edited volume from Palgrave MacMillan.