Dr Kristine Alexander

Profile

Dr. Kristine Alexander, FRHistS is a historian and interdisciplinary scholar. She uses archival research and community-engaged inquiry to better understand how ideas about childhood and adulthood, entwined with hierarchies of race, class, and gender, have worked as crucial and little-understood vectors of power in modern history. She is the author of the award-winning book Guiding Modern Girls and numerous chapters and articles about girlhood, youth organizations, colonialism, agency, and emotions. A former editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.

Research

Publications

Youth Culture and Indian Boarding Schools,” in TheOxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture, edited by James Marten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1-20. 

With Mary Jane McCallum, “A Structural Pandemic: On Statues, Colonial Violence, and the Importance of History.” ActiveHistory.ca(December 2020) 

• Part I (2 December 2020): http://activehistory.ca/2020/12/a-structural-pandemic-on-statues-colonial-violence-and-the-importance-of-history-part-i/ 
• Part II (3 December 2020): http://activehistory.ca/2020/12/a-structural-pandemic-on-statues-colonial-violence-and-the-importance-of-history/ 
• Part III (4 December 2020): http://activehistory.ca/2020/12/a-structural-pandemic-on-statues-colonial-violence-and-the-importance-of-history-part-iii/ 

Kristine Alexander, Mischa Honeck & Isabel Richter, eds., “Mapping Modern Rejuvenation,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 875-962.  

“Domestic Demobilization: Letters from the Children’s Page,” in Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War, edited by Tim Cook & J.L. Granatstein (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020), 177-189.  

With Karen Vallgårda & Stephanie Olsen. “Against Agency.” Commentaries section of the Society for the History of Children & Youth (SHCY) website. October 2018.  http://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/against-agency/ 

Kristine Alexander, Hudson Eagle Bear, Ashley Henrickson, Tesla Heavy Runner, Taylor Little Mustache, Amy Mack, Jan Newberry, Tanya Pace-Crosschild, Erin Spring, & Kaitlynn Weaver. “Translating Encounters: Connecting Indigenous Young People with Higher Education through a Transmedia Project,” Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education 10, no. 1 (2018): 61-71. 

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

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

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

With Karen Vallgårda & 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. 

“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. 

“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