This page brings together samples of my work in research, writing, media analysis, and public-facing content. My interests center on historical memory, women’s history, screen media, and the ways cultural stories are shaped for different audiences. These samples show how I approach media through both a historian’s attention to context and a communicator’s interest in making ideas clear and engaging. 

Short Writing Sample

Short Writing Sample: Women, Power, and the Stories We Keep Retelling 

A short public-facing essay examining how popular media turns historical women into simplified symbols of beauty, danger, scandal, or tragedy. 

Women, Power, and the Stories We Keep Retelling

Popular media rarely allows a powerful historical woman to remain complicated for long. She becomes beautiful or monstrous, innocent or manipulative, tragic or dangerous. Sometimes she becomes several of these things at once, but even then, the contradictions are usually arranged into a familiar story. A woman’s clothing, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, religion, or death becomes easier to remember than the political world she inhabited.

This is especially clear in portrayals of women such as Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine de’ Medici, Marie Antoinette, and Yang Kwei Fei. They lived in different places and centuries, but later stories repeatedly reduced them to similar symbols. Lucrezia became the seductive poisoner. Catherine became the foreign queen plotting from the shadows. Marie Antoinette became the beautiful, frivolous face of a collapsing monarchy. Yang Kwei Fei became the irresistible woman whose influence supposedly helped bring political disaster.

These versions endure partly because they are dramatically useful. They give audiences a recognizable villain, victim, temptress, or tragic beauty. They also turn complicated political crises into personal stories. Court factions, economic instability, religious conflict, dynastic pressure, and state violence are difficult to explain. One dangerous woman is much easier.

That does not mean these women were powerless, blameless, or untouched by the systems around them. It means their power has often been represented in highly selective ways. Men who operated within violent political structures are more likely to be described through strategy, ambition, military power, or statecraft. Women in similar environments are frequently explained through personality. They were jealous, vain, cold, seductive, overbearing, or unstable. Political action becomes evidence of private moral failure.

Lucrezia Borgia offers one of the clearest examples. Her surname became shorthand for corruption, incest, poison, and sexual danger. Dramas centered on the Borgia family often present her as either an innocent girl corrupted by her relatives or as a willing participant in their crimes. Both versions can be compelling, but they still place her within a story defined almost entirely by scandal. Her political marriages, her role within dynastic strategy, and her later position as Duchess of Ferrara receive less attention because they do not fit the image audiences already expect.

Catherine de’ Medici has undergone a similar transformation. She is often remembered as a calculating foreign queen associated with poison, religious violence, and court intrigue. Fiction tends to emphasize her darkness, her influence over her sons, and her willingness to manipulate those around her. Her position as a widow and mother attempting to preserve a fragile dynasty during prolonged conflict is harder to fit into a simple moral frame. The more complicated political setting falls away, leaving behind the recognizable image of an ambitious woman exercising power indirectly.

Marie Antoinette is remembered somewhat differently, but she is still trapped by an image. In some portrayals, she is vain and careless, surrounded by clothing, parties, and excess while France suffers. In others, she is a lonely young woman sacrificed by monarchy and destroyed by public hatred. Both versions focus heavily on appearance, emotion, and spectacle. Even sympathetic retellings can reduce her to beauty, fashion, youth, and tragedy. The political meaning of her position is often communicated through dresses, rooms, food, and rumor because those images have become inseparable from the way her life is retold.

Yang Kwei Fei is likewise remembered through a combination of beauty, romance, and national disaster. Her relationship with the emperor becomes the emotional center of the story, while political collapse is transformed into a cautionary tale about desire. The implication is familiar: a ruler became distracted by a beautiful woman, and the state suffered. This narrative gives one woman enormous symbolic power while obscuring the wider political conditions that produced the crisis.

Across these stories, beauty is rarely neutral. It becomes evidence. A beautiful woman must have used that beauty, suffered because of it, or inspired destruction through it. Clothing and luxury become signs of selfishness. Sexuality becomes manipulation. Motherhood becomes control. Grief becomes instability. Silence becomes guilt.

Visual media intensifies these patterns because it must make historical interpretation visible. Costumes, lighting, casting, framing, and performance tell audiences what kind of woman they are watching before she speaks. Dark clothing, concealed rooms, and sharp expressions can create a scheming queen. Soft light, elaborate gowns, and lingering close-ups can create a doomed beauty. These choices are not merely decorative. They help produce the historical meaning of the character.

The problem is not that film and television take creative liberties. Historical drama has never been a neutral transcript of the past. The problem is that the same liberties are repeated until they begin to feel like evidence. Once a woman has been portrayed often enough as seductive, unstable, cruel, or frivolous, later adaptations inherit that image. Each new version appears to confirm the last.

More careful representation does not require turning every historical woman into a misunderstood heroine. It requires allowing her to exist within the political, cultural, and emotional world that shaped her. A woman can be privileged and vulnerable. She can exercise power and still be constrained. She can make damaging choices without becoming the sole explanation for a political disaster. She can be beautiful without beauty becoming the meaning of her life.

The stories we keep retelling reveal as much about the present as they do about the past. Historical women remain useful symbols because audiences still recognize the categories assigned to them. The dangerous woman, the foreign queen, the frivolous wife, and the tragic beauty have never disappeared. They have simply been recast.

Looking more closely at these portrayals does not make historical storytelling less dramatic. It makes the drama more honest. The most interesting version of a historical woman is rarely the simplest one.