View my CV to see information about my research, teaching, publications, and other aspects of my work.
Highlights
Current Projects
Visualizing the Sidney Network
Uses network analysis to visualize and contextualize the Dudley-Sidney network using an extensive collection of letters. This project will highlight the important place of women in family and political networks and be a resource for scholars in history, literature, early modern and British studies.
Women, Gender, and Chronic Illness
A cultural study of women’s experiences and cultural understandings of chronic illness in early modern periods and contemporary accounts based in cultural history and gender studies. It draws from history of the body, disability studies, feminist theory, and narratives of health to examine the past and speak to the present. It will examine how culture shapes the ways women’s chronic illness is understood and experienced using a comparative approach that highlights difference and similarity to show the cultural basis of illness and treatment and how social constructs of gender are central to women’s experiences of chronic illness. This project questions who is granted the place of authority on women’s bodies and experiences and examines the context surrounding women’s status as authorities on their own bodies.
Mary Dudley Sidney and Katherine Dudley Hastings as Political Actors
Drawing off my dissertation “She Governs the Queen:” Jane Dudley, Mary Dudley Sidney, and Katherine Dudley Hastings’ Political Actions, Agency, and Networks in Tudor England, this project examines the Dudley sisters’ lives and various avenues to political agency in Elizabethan England.
Education
PhD, History, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, May 2016
Dissertation: “She Governs the Queen:” Jane Dudley, Mary Dudley Sidney, and Katherine Dudley Hastings’ Political Actions, Agency, and Networks in Tudor England
MA, History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, May 2011
Thesis: “A Very Goddess of Persuasion:” Mary Dudley Sidney as Exemplar of
Women’s Political Power in Elizabethan England.
BA, History, Creighton University, May 2009
Teaching, Publications, and Presentations
I have taught and developed introductory and advanced courses in women’s history, European history, women’s and gender studies, and humanities in medicine.
My publications include ” Using Network Analysis to Understand Early Modern Women” in Early Modern Women, An Interdisciplinary Journal, “More Than a Wife and Mother: Jane Dudley, the Woman Who Bequeathed a Parrot and Served Five Queens” in Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens, “Mary Dudley Sidney and Her Dudley Siblings” in the Ashgate Research Companion on The Sidneys (1500-1700), co-authored with Carole Levin, and “To Persuade and Connect: Mary Sidney’s Essential Role in Henry Sidney’s Irish Rule” in the Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2012 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference.
I was a selected participant for the NEH Workshop, Early Modern Digital Agendas- Network Analysis in July 2017 and the Mellon Summer Institute in English Paleography in June 2014. I received fellowships from the North American Conference on British Studies, UNL’s History department and Medieval and Renaissance Studies program to complete my dissertation research.
I have presented my research at a number of conferences including the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Renaissance Society of American Annual Meeting, the Queen Elizabeth I Society at the South Central Renaissance Conference, and the American Historical Association annual meeting.
I am active in service to the university and community.
Catherine Medici Ph.D. 