Kristine Alexander

SSHRC Posdoctoral Fellow 2010-2012

PhD, York University, 2010
BA University of Winnipeg, 2002; MA York University, 2003

Research Interests

 My research centres on children and warfare and a variety of links between youth, gender, race, empire and internationalism in early twentieth-century Canada.  By studying the Girl Guides in interwar England, Canada and India and Canadian children during the First World War, I have sought to contribute new perspectives to the academic literatures on those subjects, while also shedding light on a number of broader themes.  These themes include the relative importance of the local and the global; the shifting fortunes of imperialism, internationalism and national identities in the early twentieth century; the complex relationship between adults’ ideals and young people’s thoughts and actions; and the lives of women and girls in Canada and beyond.

Publications

 “Canadian Girls and the Great War,” in Canadian and Newfoundland Women and the First World War, edited by Sarah Glassford & Amy Shaw.  (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming). 

 “Canadian Girls, Imperial Girls, Global Girls,” in Inside and Outside the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, edited by Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry & Henry Yu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 

“The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 37-63. 

 “Similarity and Difference at Girl Guide Camps in England, Canada and India,” in Scouting Frontiers: Global Youth in the Scout Movement’s First Century, edited by Tammy Proctor & Nelson Block.  (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 104-118.   

 “Une pédagogie des rôles sociaux dans le guidisme canadien anglophone,” in  Guidisme, scoutisme et coéducation: Pour une histoire de la mixité dans les mouvements de jeunesse, edited by Thierry Scaillet, Françoise Rosart & Sophie Wittemans (Louvain-le-Neuve: Académia bruylant, 2007), 195-210. 

 “Motherhood, Citizenship, Continuity, and Change: The Girl Guides, Gender and Imperialism in Interwar English Canada.”  Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Graduate Symposium in Women’s and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  http://www.history.uiuc.edu/hist%20grad%20orgs/WGHS/prc2004_alexander.htm

Teaching

I have undergraduate teaching experience in a range of geographical and temporal areas, including courses on “Cultures and Colonialism: Canada, c.1600-1900” (History, York University), “Britain and the First World War” (History and Peace Studies, McMaster University), “Britain from 1688 to the Present” (History, Huron University College), and most recently “Imperial Cities: Delhi & London” (History, the University of Western Ontario).

Selected Grants & Awards 

Also from this web page:

Courses Taught

• History 3703:  Imperial Cities:  Delhi & London (2010)