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Alexandra Shepard

professor of gender history, University of Glasgow

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 28, 2025
Entity authorityQ56486558
Source-derived summary

Alexandra Jane Shepard is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow. In 2018 Shepard was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition for her work in gender history and the social history of early modern Britain. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Career

Shepard is Professor of Gender History within the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, where her research interests focus on early modern British history, with an emphasis on the social, cultural and economic history and gender relations. Her work has particular emphasis on masculinity in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, and more recently has undertaken comparative research on women's work and agency in early modern history. Her work has contributed to changing the understanding of working-class life over the past five centuries.

She is Co-Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice: Britain and Ireland, c.1100-c.1750’, which explores women's access to justice across Britain and Ireland between the 12th and 18th centuries. Shepard also leads a Leverhulme International Network Grant on “Producing Change: Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe", awarded in 2015.

She has previously taught and researched at St John's College, Oxford, the University of Sussex and Christ's College, Cambridge. Her PhD thesis studied Early Modern student life at Cambridge University, and in particular how undergraduate students expressed their male identities.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Alexandra Shepard” is professor of gender history, University of Glasgow. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Alexandra, Shepard and professor, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2018, 2019, 1100, 1750—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Alexandra, Shepard and professor is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “professor of gender history, University of Glasgow” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q56486558. VIAF identifies the subject as 66649925. The Library of Congress control number is no2001019838. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2019, 1100 and 1750.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Alexandra Shepard”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Alexandra Shepard primary sources, Alexandra Shepard archive and Alexandra research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Alexandra Shepard”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Alexandra Shepard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.