About Me

Hi guys, thank you all so much for joining me on my daily fangirling sessions! I just wanted to properly introduce myself for those who don't know me. 

My name is Chloë, I'm 23, and I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. 




I've loved history for as long as I can remember - it's hard not to growing up in one of the most beautiful and historic countries in the world! Some of my earliest memories are of my Grandpa taking me to the museum where he worked as a security guard (and where I ended up working myself for almost five years!). I'm also half English and when visiting my family in Brighton we spent many happy days visiting places associated with famous Tudor ladies such as Hever Castle (home of Anne Boleyn) and Anne of Cleves house in Lewes. At primary school, we visited Holyrood Palace to learn about Mary Queen of Scots and I fell even more in love with history - this was probably around the same time I started collecting Egyptian statues instead of cats (I wish I could say I got cooler as I got older but that would be a lie!) 

I did my undergrad and my MscR in Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where I hope to begin a PhD in September. One of the reasons I love Religious Studies is that it's so interdisciplinary and has also allowed to me history in various different contexts - although I loved Islamic history the best! I did a lot of colonial stuff too, and I did my undergrad dissertation on Buddhist responses to mass death (all I learned from it was that nothing kills a conversation quite like genocide!) For my masters' thesis I researched interreligious relations in India. My thesis was on how Hindu nationalist concepts of masculinity contributes to the "Othering" of Muslims. My PhD will hopefully look at how the trans community in India challenge gender and religious binaries. For the last year, I've been learning Hindi to aid me in my endeavours...so far I can say about six sentences? The Duo Lingo app is my best friend right now. After 8 years of saving I was finally supposed to travel India this year - but Corona put pay to that! Hopefully next year!!

While I was at uni I had the honour of working weekends and the summer at National Museum of Scotland and Edinburgh Castle. It was the best first job I could've had and I enjoyed every second of being surrounded by such beautiful buildings, artefacts, and people for 4.5 years! The flat I lived in last year was also 400 years old so I was literally breathing in the history! Now I get to work in another of Edinburgh's most beautiful and historic sites and still be surrounded by history every day! 

Feminism is also in my blood given that no men were born in my family for 62 years so I've been surrounded by strong and smart women all my life who showed me that anything men can do, women can do bleeding!  At a car boot sale when I was around 8, my Auntie bought me a book called The Raven Queen about Lady Jane Grey - which i swiftly followed with the much more adult "The Innocent Traitor" by Alison Weir and the rest is history (ha...) When I did an English talk on Anne Boleyn in high school, even my teacher called me a nerd! 

I also love musicals and Michael Buble (I'm 90 at heart), reading and tv, photography, travelling - or at least I did in a pre-covid world -, playing piano, and my kitten Bagheera. All the really cool stuff...that I could do with your nan. 

I've always tried to combine my three interests of history, religion, and feminism - I think I must've written an essay on gender in every major tradition at least twice! But now I just do it for fun on this blog! So thanks for indulging me! To me, history is so important: it influences every aspect of our lives and we have so much to learn about our present and our future from really getting to grips with the past. History has served to inspire me, warn me, entertain me, and enrich me - and none more so than learning about all the bad-ass women who helped make the world what it is today!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elizabeth Taylor

Image
Today marks 10 years since the icon that was Elizabeth Taylor passed away. There is so much to cover here that this will be a rather long post, apologies in advance. Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor   DBE  (1932 – 2011) was an English-American actress, businesswoman, and humanitarian. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of  classical Hollywood cinema  in the 1950s. She continued her career successfully into the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the  American Film Institute  named her the seventh- greatest female screen legend  of all time. Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London on February 27. She received  dual British-American citizenship  at birth, as both her parents, art dealer  Francis Lenn Taylor  and retired stage actress  Sara Sothern were from Kansas.   She was raised according to the teachings of  Christian Science .   In early 1939, the Taylors were urged by
Read more

Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022): How can a Republican mourn the Queen?

Image
Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022)   👑❤️ This is not my usual kind of herstory post. It is not a biography - although hopefully I'll get to write one about the historic reign of the queen someday. All yesterday, I had a lot of conflicting feels about the queens passing, and I know that a lot of people I’ve spoken to feel the same. I spent most of yesterday asking myself "how can a republican mourn the passing of the queen"? This ramble is my attempt to answer that question. I realise this is a very touchy subject and something that everyone will have strong opinions on one way or another, and please note that i totally understand both sides of the coin so please don't hate me.  On one hand, as the BBC said itself, she was the “face of the British empire” - an empire which I’ve dedicated my career (or at least a PhD and a book) to celebrating the end and highlighting the evils of. From the media coverage, you can see the nostalgia for that empire that she was the last
Read more

Women's Experiences in the Partition of India

Image
    PLEASE NOTE: some of this makes for quite a harrowing read.)                Today marks 73 years since the Partition of India along religious lines, and the creation of Pakistan. It also marks Indian Independence from British Rule. The British granted India her independence on August 15 th 1947, dividing the subcontinent along the Punjab creating different nations for the different religious communities. 50 million people were displaced as Muslims left on the Hindu side of the border migrated to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs in Muslim Pakistan migrated to the newly independent India.   Before Partition, the population of India was approx 390 million. After partition, there were 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). During the upheaval which followed Partition, one million people died as a result of famine, disease, and interreligious violence. While every community suffered in the carnage surrounding P
Read more