Women's Studies Faculty Profile
Annette Parks, PhD
Associate Professor of History
As an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Evansville, Annette Parks' primary research interest is hostage-taking in social and political relations between medieval England, Scotland and Wales. An important part of her work is classifying political marriage as a form of hostage-taking, arguing that both institutions were primarily intended to establish or solidify social and political bonds, often to encourage long-term diplomatic agendas.
In the classroom, most of Professor Parks' classes include a gender component. She has had the opportunity as part of the women's studies program to teach a number of courses, including one on medieval warfare that devotes significant time to various forms of female participation in war. Most recently she taught a course examining women's lives in the pre-modern world cross-culturally, taking stock of the female experience in Europe, Asia, Africa and India. In this and in her other courses with a strong gender component, Professor Parks focuses on two broad goals: first, exploding the myth of oppression and repression as the alpha and omega of the female experience in the pre-modern era and, second, helping to stimulate an appreciation for the richness, diversity and complexity of women's interests and experiences, especially in the Middle Ages. Among other things, she concludes that, across culture, class is invariably a much more important determinant of experience than is gender. Further, power and status as well as the ways in which women themselves viewed their lot in life often rested on foundations very different from modern stereotypes and expectations.
