Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Childhood, youth, age, girlhood, settler colonialism, imperial and transnational history, family history, emotions, First World War, Girl Guides, youth organizations, education

About Me: I am currently Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies, Associate Professor of History, and Director of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies (I-CYS) at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

My scholarship focuses on children and youth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in imperial, transnational, and settler colonial contexts. I use archival documents (textual sources, photographs, and moving images) to better understand how individual young people’s lives have been shaped by global processes and events. Thinking critically and intersectionally about age, gender, race, class, and emotions, my work also investigates how symbolic and imagined children have been and continue to be mobilized by military and colonial projects across the modern world.

My book Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (UBC Press, 2017) recently received the Wilson Prize, awarded annually by the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University to “the book that offers the best exploration of Canadian history that succeeds in making Canadian historical scholarship accessible to a wide and transnational audience.”

Recent Publications: Kristine Alexander, Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.

Kristine Alexander, “Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History,” History Compass 14, no. 9 (September 2016): 397-406.

Kristine Alexander, “Agency and Emotion Work,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 7, no. 2 (2015): 120-128.

Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, & Stephanie Olsen, “Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood,” in Childhood, Youth, and Emotions in Modern History, edited by Stephanie Olsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 12-34.

Kristine Alexander, “Picturing Girlhood and Empire,” in Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950, edited by Kristine Moruzi & Michelle Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 197-213.

Kristine Alexander, “An Honour and a Burden: Canadian Girls and the Great War,” in A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Canadian and Newfoundland Girls and Women and the First World War, edited by Sarah Glassford & Amy Shaw (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 173-194.

Kristine Alexander, “Can the Girl Guide Speak? The Perils and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival Research,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures (Summer 2012): 132-144.

Expertise by Topic: Children & Youth, Colonialism, Family, Gender, Military, Women, World War I