Lois G. Schwoerer
Emeritus Faculty
Lois Green Schwoerer was a full-time member of the History Department for 32 years. During this time, she taught courses on the Renaissance, Tudor-Stuart England, European Women, and the survey of Western Europe. With others she initiated steps that led to the creation of the Women’s Studies major. Before coming to GWU, she taught at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pittsburgh. Schwoerer served the profession as President of the North American Conference on British Studies and on committees of the American Historical Association. She was a member of the founding committee and then of the Steering Committee of the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was also on the Yale University Board of Parliamentary History and continues as a member of the American Friends of the Institute of Historical Research: Board since 1990.
Schwoerer received fellowships and/or awards from American Philosophical Society, Folger Shakespeare Library, GWU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and National Endowment for the Humanities. She was a Mellon Fellow at Henry E. Huntington Library, elected to the British Royal History Society, honored with a festschrift, [Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain (1997)], and received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from George Washington University in 2002.
Elmer Louis Kayser Professor Emerita of History
Scholar-in-Residence, Folger Shakespeare Library
The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins, 1981) won Honorable Mention in the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize competition.
"No Standing Armies!" The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) won the annual prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for the best book published by a woman historian.
- Renaissance
- Tudor-Stuart England
- European Women
Books and Editions
Gun Culture in early modern England (Charlottesville, Va.: The University of Virginia Press), Spring 2016.
The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care: Restoration Publicist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Paperback edition:Tempus Press, London. 2004.
The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500-1800, ed. J.G.A. Pocock; co-eds. Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
The Revolution of 1688-89: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge University Press, 1992): Wrote Chapter: "The Coronation of 1689."
Lady Rachel Russell (1637-1723): "One of the Best of Women." (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins, 1981) - Won Honorable Mention in the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize competition
"No Standing Armies!" The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Won annual prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for the best book published by a woman historian.
Articles and Chapters in Books
(Five of forty, including entries in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.)
“Women and Guns in Early Modern London.” Challenging Orthodoxies: Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women, eds. Sigrun Haude and Melinda Zook. (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 33-52.
“The Grenville Militia List for Buckinghamshire, 1798-1799.” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2005), pp. 667-676.
“Law, Liberty, and Jury ‘Ideology’: English Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions.” In Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, ed. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004), pp. 35-64.
“To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective,” Symposium on the Second Amendment: Fresh Looks. Chicago- Kent Law Review 76, no. 1 (2000), pp. 27-60. Reprinted in The Second Amendment in Law and History, ed. Carl Bogus. (New York: The New Press, 2002).
“Women's Public Political Voice in England: 1640-1700." In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition. ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 56-74.
Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College
M.A., Bryn Mawr College
B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Smith College