Scholarship

We are pleased to spotlight some of the scholarship generated by the WWP and the 113 Warrior Women Ballads. Below please find essays written by members of the WWP team.

Our Background Essays offer select contexts and foundations for reading and thinking about the ballads: what is “impressment”? What role does America play in the ballads? How are WW ballads in conversation with other warrior woman narratives, and how are the ballads adapted in popular culture? What do we know about “real” warrior women? And even “what is this project all about”? We would love to expand this section and welcome ideas and even volunteer essay writers: contact us through our Feedback page!

Our Critical Essays are more academic papers reflecting research questions on topics including confinement, identity and society, race, class, prosthesis, military propaganda, and language. Many of these papers are part of larger works-in-progress or related to the authors’ other research. Please reach out to any member of our team with constructive feedback about their work!

Some of us have presented and work related to our WWP research at conferences, and we have attempted to record those presentations here as well. We expect this area to grow! Please let us know if you use our site toward a presentation or publication, so that we can add your work here and in the bibliography on our Resources page.

We are also pleased to share Related Projects, which include edited volumes of works that are in conversation with the WWP ballads.

Critical Essays

Fall 2019

Erika Carbonara, “‘My Body You May […] Confine’: Depictions of Female Confinement and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern Broadside Ballads

Robert Chapman-Morales, “Deconstructing Identity: How the Warrior Women Ballads Show an Ideal Society”

Sarah Chapman, “‘With Pitch and Tar Appeared In Pain’: Whiteness as Class Signifiers in Warrior Women Ballads

Matthew Jewell,”The Fair Merchant’s Heiress: Class Dressing in Warrior Women Ballads

Bernadette Kelly, “Prosthetic Forms of Sex in Early Modern Warrior Women Ballads

Kelly Plante, “Marketing Empire: Military Recruitment and Companionate Marriage in British Broadside Ballads

Lindsay Ragle-Miller, “What Did You Call Me?! Terms of Endearment in Women Warrior Ballads”

Background Essays

Fall 2019

Erika Carbonara, “Pressed to War: Depictions of Wartime Nonconsent

Sarah Chapman, “Warrior Women in the Americas

Robert Chapman Morales, “Warrior Women in Context: Mulan as an Example of the Warrior Woman Motif

Matthew Jewell, “Providence and Propaganda: Messages of Religious Persuasion in 17th-century ‘Warrior Men’

Bernadette Kelly, “Real Warrior Women: Mary Ann Matthews Wrighten Pownal

Kelly Plante, “The Story of the Warrior Women Project: Using Technology to Connect Intersectionality and Digital Humanities Theory and Praxis

Lindsay Ragle-Miller, “‘Monstrous’ yet ‘Pretty’: Popular Culture Adaptations of Polly Oliver

Presentations

(above) Simone Chess, Erika Carbonara, Robert Chapman-Morales, Kelly Plante, and Lindsay Ragle-Miller, “Building the Warrior Women Project: Digital Humanities and a Broadside Ballad Archive.” Panel presentation at Wonder Women & Rebel Girls: Women Warriors in the Media, ca. 1800-present

Erika Carbonara, “‘My Body You May […] Confine’: Depictions of Female Confinement and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern Broadside Ballads.” Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies GraduateStudent Conference, Chicago, IL, Jan. 2020.

Simone Chess, “‘The Soldier Was Delivered’: Trans Pregnancies in the ‘Warrior Women’ Ballads.” Queer Pregnancies in Early Modern Literature panel at Modern Language Association (MLA), Seattle, WA, Jan. 2020.

Bernadette Kelly, “The Prosthetics of Sex in Early Modern Broadside Ballads.” Probing the Archive panel at the Ray Browne Conference, Bowling Green, Ohio, Mar. 2020.

Kelly Plante, “Marketing Empire: Military Recruitment and Companionate Marriage in British Broadside Ballads.” Cheap Print: Chapbooks, Ballads, News, Scandal, and Inexpensive Ephemera panel at South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies: The Speedy Enlightenment, St. Augustine, FL, Feb. 2020.

Kelly Plante, “Equipped herself in the habit of a man”: Exposing Empire in The Female SpectatorEliza Haywood and Empire panel at ASECS, Feb 2021.

Kelly Plante, “The Mad Exploit She Had Undertaken”: A Critical Edition of Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator, Book 14, Letter 1, with Introduction