GENDER.ED Directory

This option explores a masterpiece of classical Italian prose, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-1353), a collection of 100 tales told by 10 young people (seven women and three men) who flee plague-stricken Florence to a delightful villa in nearby Fiesole. This course will contextualise and analyse the original text, as well as look at its afterlife across arts and media in the following centuries. We will examine topics, such as fortune, love, death, wit, and critically engage with questions of gender, class, sexuality, and religion.

Biography

Wannes Dupont is Lecturer in the History of Sexuality at the University of Edinburgh. He previously held positions at Yale-NUS College and Utrecht University and fellowships at Yale University, Australian National University, and the University of Antwerp. His work, publications, and teaching primarily concern the European and global history of sexuality, reproductive politics, and the intersections of biopolitics and religion.

Current Projects

Before the Gender Wars: The Globalisation of Sexuality as a Policy issue, 1945-1965

Wendy Ugolini is Professor of Second World War Studies at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. She is a cultural-military historian of the Second World War, specialising in race, ethnicities, and identity formation. She is a Co-Founder of the Second World War Network (Scotland) and PI on the AHRC project, 'The Second World War, National Identities and Empire in the UK'.

This course provides a detailed examination of the development of contemporary dance and live performance from 1913 to the present day. Through analysis of visual, filmed and written material, you will identify crucial parallels between dance and visual art movements, connecting aesthetic analysis to relevant social and historical context throughout the period surveyed.

Within the confines of Roman society, women were traditionally accorded private, domestic roles, but an intriguing body of inscriptions and material evidence from the empire's eastern provinces tells a markedly different story. This evidence reveals numerous wealthy and influential women holding priesthoods, performing lavish benefactions, (co)founding public building projects, and even acting as civic officials.

The aim of this course is to examine the representation of women and gender in the New Testament and other ancient Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian texts. The course will involve analysis of historical texts and introduce students to the methodological challenges involved in studying ancient sources on women and gender. Students will be introduced to scholarly debates about the extent to which we are able to reconstruct the lives and experiences of women in the ancient world, and will explore recent work on the construction of masculinity in ancient texts.

This course is about women who worked in Premodern Europe from artists to midwives; authors to sex workers. It critically considers how certain forms of bodily labour and creative practice become gendered as 'women's work' We will study both the representation of women labouring in art and the ways medieval women asserted their authorship and authority when at work. This course addresses a diversity of mediums across art, visual and material culture including manuscript illumination, mixed-media sculpture and textiles.

This module provides a detailed consideration of the ways in which the idiom of human rights both empowers and emasculates different women around the world. It considers women¿s rights historically, theoretically, institutionally and through a variety of case studies. No knowledge of the topic is required, but some familiarity with general human rights debates is useful.   Credit level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate SCQF credits: 20

Not running in 2026/27

The aim of this course is to examine the representation of women and gender in the New Testament and other ancient Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian texts. The course will involve careful analysis of historical texts as well as critical reflection on the methodological challenges involved in studying ancient sources on women and gender. Students will also explore relevant debates in New Testament scholarship.

This course explores the history of engagement by women writers and artists with the place, idea, and myths of Greece. We first read ancient female writers -- preeminently Sappho -- and examine the representation of women in ancient texts; we then trace the multiple strategies through which "Greece" allows later women writers to assert their authority and authorship, question gender hierarchies and political/sociocultural paradigms, and lay a claim to the classical tradition.