Gale Ambassadors

Gale is committed to helping students discover research insights to advance learning and research. Gale Ambassadors are students who work within their own university to increase awareness of the Gale primary source collections available to their fellow students. Our Ambassadors study a variety of different disciplines, and all are open to receiving thoughts or questions from other students at their university about Gale Primary Sources.

Exploring Corporate Social Responsibility Through the Times Digital Archive

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│By Brendon Ndoro, Gale Ambassador at the University of Cape Town│

When does one acknowledge the impact of their decisions on society? How does one remedy their wrongdoings? When does one act in response to the threat their actions bring upon the welfare and sustainability of society and the environment?

These are a few questions Business Studies students may come across when delving into the world of business ethics. A great starting point to answering questions like these lies in understanding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR is an ongoing practice in the world of business. It is a management concept focusing on the integration of social and environmental concerns into a business’s operations and relationships with various stakeholders.

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Femininity and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century European Aesthetics

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

In March 2022, an exhibition entitled Fashioning Masculinities opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Its manifesto was to show a ‘history of changing ideas of masculinity’. The exhibition greeted visitors with a gallery of plaster-casts of statues in a Greco-Roman idiom. Amongst them stood Pietro Francavilla’s statue of Apollo, a Renaissance sculpture depicting the apparent timelessness of the nude masculine ideal of Western classical epistemology.

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Perfecting the Elevator Pitch: Using Gale Primary Sources to Unpack Intellectual History

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

With great power comes great responsibility. With being a doctoral researcher comes the ever-present question: what do you work on? As a response, you come up with an elevator pitch that somewhat does justice to your project. To do so, you find yourself using abstract terms like ‘universality’ and ‘contingency’, often leaving your audience none the wiser as to what exactly it is you do.

So, when Gale Primary Sources offered me the opportunity to write a blog post centred on my research, I decided to use their archives and digital humanities tools as a way of finally perfecting my elevator pitch.

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Fabricating History: Empire Lines, Modern Designs, and the Politics of Dress in Regency Representations

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│By Megan Harlow, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Regency fashion has become a cultural touchstone, romanticised amid the contemporary resurgence of early nineteenth-century period dramas. The global reception of Bridgerton (2020–), alongside the proliferation of the ‘Regencycore’ aesthetic, exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between historical narrative engagement and a renewed preoccupation with sartorial historiography, positioning fashion as a dynamic site of aesthetic and ideological negotiation.

Yet, as screen portrayals negotiate between historical fidelity and modern sensibilities, they often obscure the constructed nature of costume, selectively resurrecting aspects of the past while neglecting the intricate social, political, and economic meanings embedded in dress. 

Drawing on Gale Primary Sources, this analysis interrogates how Regency fashion was originally represented and how its legacy is reshaped in adaptation. Ultimately, questioning what histories are made visible through costume, and what is strategically forgotten, highlighting the historiographical implications of fashion in contemporary media.

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Keeping Track of Research for your Undergraduate Humanities Dissertation and Using Gale’s Digital Resources

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│By Jessica Crawley, Gale Ambassador at the University of Lancaster│

So, you’re a humanities undergraduate writing a dissertation, are you? If you’re anything like me, then you’re already finding this process as overwhelming as it is exciting. You have likely never taken on a research project this vast before, and that’s okay! You’re already on the right track by clicking this blog, and by the end of your dissertation process you’ll be a pro. Most of these skills are transferrable to essays too so, even if you aren’t writing a dissertation, this blog will still be of use to you.

This is the blog that I WISH someone had written when I first started researching for my dissertation: I was clueless, directionless, and – honestly – a little bit scared to start. If you’re having any of these feelings too, then after this blog they will hopefully start to melt away. I’ll be mainly referencing Gale’s Digital Resources, but if you don’t have access to any of these then speak to your library about any similar resources they may have to offer.

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Leaning Into The Great Gatsby and Other Primary Sources

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Still from the Film “the Painted Flapper"

│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

At 100 years’ old, The Great Gatsby is more popular than ever. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal 1925 novel encapsulates the obsessive nature of the American Dream alongside investigating truths about love and desire. Novels like this are one example of a primary source, with primary sources being first-hand accounts of contemporary periods and phenomena.

Needless to say, various types of primary source should be positioned differently within the creation or evidencing of an argument, and each source has many arguments that can be drawn out from it. But what are the best ways to use these primary sources? This post will guide you through the process of finding and using primary sources from Gale Primary Sources, starting with The Great Gatsby.

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How Gale Primary Sources Supports Students Taking Exeter University’s ‘Approaches to Criticism’ Module

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│By Poppy Sargent, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

The first year ‘Approaches to Criticism’ module taught to English students at the University of Exeter is notoriously one of the hardest compulsory modules, spanning across both first and second term. Throughout this module, you learn to think about yourselves as infinitely complex social and political subjects and how our social and political being shapes reading practices, focusing on systems and subjects in relation to one another.

Leveraging literature from Gale Primary Sources, this blog will highlight how Gale supports this module, sourcing manuscripts and monographs to aid students and lecturers in their work. By focusing on three of (in my opinion) the most interesting and crucial topics of this module, I will show you how Gale’s extensive archives highlight articles covering Marxism, Bodies and Medicine, and Critical Race Studies.

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Lights, Camera, Snaption: The Impacts of Living in an Imaged Based Society

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│By Olivia McDermott, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool│

In our contemporary world, visual media plays an increasingly important role in how we socialise, develop our opinions and create online personas. Though the ability to capture and translate the world around us into images can be dated back to the time of Aristotle, the invention of the photographic camera occurred in the early nineteenth century by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.

Over a period of just under two hundred years, the commercialisation of the camera now means that anyone can become a photographer. However, many scholars argue that such rapid technological advancement is leading to social changes that we are struggling to adapt to. For example, the pressures on people to only post perfect, airbrushed photos are causing an identity crisis, particularly amongst the youth; AI deepfakes are causing detrimental, psychological issues and the obsession with only sharing the good parts of life is leading to increasing reports of isolation.

As a young woman who has grown up in the digital age, I am more than aware of the ways in which social media infiltrates through to all areas of life. Living in an imaged-based society continues to overlap within the personal, relational, academic and professional spheres, but how did we get here?

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Edward Teller: No Cold War without the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

On July 21, 2023, the world – or at least the world that exists on the internet – was taken over by a cinematic phenomenon: the simultaneous release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. ‘Barbenheimer’, if you will. The long, pandemic-delayed release of a film about the world’s most famous doll and the man behind the Manhattan Project became an unlikely couple, drawing people back to the cinema screen in unprecedent numbers.

As a historian who’s particularly fascinated by popular culture and the Cold War, the summer of 2023 became a perfect opportunity for me to reflect on the relationship between these two concepts, especially when understanding the prevalence of the American – arguably Western – perspective on the twentieth century. Two years on, Gale Primary Sources’ collections, primarily Archives Unbound, have given me the tools to explore my interests further.

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Reimagining Global Politics: International Relations through a Non-Western Lens

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│By Aiman Urooj, Gale Ambassador at the University of Delhi│

International Relations (IR) has long been dominated by Western-centric theories, primarily shaped by European and American intellectual traditions. These frameworks—Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism prioritise state sovereignty, individualism, and economic liberalism. This Eurocentric lens limits IR’s ability to fully explain global politics, reinforcing a Westphalian state system that does not reflect realities outside the West.

Non-Western epistemology challenges the universal applicability of mainstream IR theories by offering alternate frameworks for understanding contemporary IR. This blog explores these alternate perspectives, with concepts like Ubuntu’s relational ethics in Africa, Tianxia’s hierarchical harmony in China, Islamic justice, and Russia’s civilizational sovereignty.

By exploring archival sources from Chatham House Online Archive scholars can uncover evidence that highlights the contributions of non-Western societies to global diplomacy.

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