AbstractsWomens Studies

What impact did American Protestant institutions play in educating women in the late Ottoman Empire? This dissertation examines how the convergence of American Protestantism and local nationalism enabled women in Ottoman and independent Albania to emerge in the public sphere. In the U.S. female seminaries originally trained women to be wives of missionary men; in the Near East they imbued students with a desire for broad social activism. When alumnae returned to their native environments and opened “daughter schools”, they served as emissaries of faith and modernism. In Albania, the Kyrias School for Girls and the cultural brokers who administered it, took up that role. I gage their consistent dialogue with American institutions and people and map out a trajectory of empirical articles through which women became public: mission work, education, politics, and publication. Evangelizing and teaching in the Albanian language, a politically subversive act, pushed female activists and inspired students to branch out in the fields of national politics and publication. The Kyrias School eventually became a template for a network of national schools, and its activists championed Albanian independence and defined early expressions of local feminism in the press and in voluntary organizations. Advisors/Committee Members: Fine(jr), John V (committee member), Ballinger, Pamela (committee member), Gocek, Fatma Muge (committee member), Lindner, Rudi P (committee member), Kelley, Mary C (committee member), Reeves-Ellington, Barbara (committee member).