Alexandra Shepard

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 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’, Shepard also leads a Leverhulme International Network Grant on “Producing Change: Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe",

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.

Awards Shepard won the Leo Gershoy Award in 2016 for second book, Accounting for Oneself, published in February 2015; an annual prize awarded by the American Historical Association for outstanding works published on 17th- and 18th-century European history’. The book, a culmination of a decade of work, examines how ordinary people valued themselves and understood social order and self-esteem, using innovative methods of historiography. Shepard used over 13,000 witness statements, of which 3,331 were by women, made between the years 1550 to 1728 in church courts and Cambridge University courts, to examine the relationship between wealth, occupation and social identity.

In 2004, whilst at Christ's College, Cambridge, Shepard was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2017, Shepard received a Leverhulme Research Fellowships for research on family and economy in England, 1660–1815.

Personal life Shepard married engineering scientist Jason Reese, latterly Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, in 2001. Their daughter Zoe was born in 2007. Reese died of a suspected heart attack in March 2019.