Rachel Hamilton

I am a second year PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr. Sandra den Otter. My research interests include nineteenth-century Britain, the British monarchy, gender, print culture and media, and mental health. My current project studies more than 80 individuals who intruded on Queen Victoria's privacy over the course of her reign (1837-1901), and who we would today call "stalkers." I am interested in studying the ways these intrusions and the media coverage they received reflected contemporary ideas of gender and mental illness, I study the ways these intrusions and the media coverage they received factored into broader debates about gender, mental illness, policing, and the public's relationship with and reconceptualization of the British monarchy.

Conference Papers 

"'Another Visitor to the Palace': Gender, Mental Illness, and Intruders on the British Royal Family's Privacy, 1837-1900." Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Women's and Gender History Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois (online), 3 March 2024. 

"'Another Candidate for Royal Audience': Gender, Rights of Access, and Queen Victoria's Stalkers in the Media, 1837-1840." Paper presented at the Northeast Conference on British Studies, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 14 October 2023. 

"'The Queen's Last Lunatic Lover': Mental Illness in Popular Representations and Memories of Queen Victoria's Stalkers, 1837-1841." Paper presented at the 20th Annual McGill-Queen's Graduate Conference in History, Kingston, Ontario (online), 29 April 2023.