Nadia Jones-Gailani:
The opportunity to present at the ‘Little Berks’ before generations of leading women and gender historians, and alongside noted scholar Claudia Koonz, was truly an honour.  Koonz began the session by exploring the ways in which veiling is portrayed in the European media, followed by my paper examining negotiations of the political and personal meanings of veiling in Canada. Our papers opened up a dialogue on the multiple meanings and messages of veiling, and the powerful use of the hijab as both a personal and political statement.  This paper is part of my dissertation research, which looks at ethno-religious difference in Iraqi diasporic communities in Toronto and Detroit, with a focus on the ways in which women negotiate hyphen identity and their continued links to the homeland.  The experience of the ‘Little Berks’ as a graduate student was very positive, as we were made to feel at home in this tradition of bringing together women in a space that invited relaxation, shared confidences, and intellectual stimulation.  The beauty of the location, and the lively discussions following panel talks and the business meeting made for an eventful and enlightening initiation into the organization!

Lisa Ndejuru:
Lisa was invited to the little berks in connection with her involvement in the Montreal Life Stories project at Concordia University (http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/). She followed colleague, Anna Sheftel, who discussed her experiences working with survivors of mass violence, and research that took her to Bihać, a city in the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 2005, to research wartime memory in the region. As one of the founding members, and committee coordinators of the Montreal Life Stories project, Lisa has also been centrally involved in the Rwandan working group and with various performance-based workshops that draw on oral narratives and experiment with different ways of creating dialogue around such difficult stories. In addition to discussing these efforts, she talked about the challenge of translating these tragic and powerful stories into theatre meant to be both political and therapeutic for performers and audience. She found the whole experience, including some pointed questions about the project, very interesting, adding that it had prompted her to reflect on various strategies for narrating memories of genocide through this form of storytelling.

Also shown: Michele Mitchell and Berks Treasurer, Ardis Cameron

Book Prize

The Berkshire Conference now awards two book prizes. One prize is for a first book in any field of history written by a woman who is normally resident in North America. This prize is not restricted by historical field. The other prize is also for a first book written by a woman normally resident in North America, but it will be awarded to a book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality. Only one copy of a book needs to be submitted; if relevant, it will be considered for both prizes. Textbooks, juveniles, documentary collections, fiction, poetry, and collections of essays are not eligible for either prize.

For this year’s competition, each entry must be published during the period January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2011. If a book carries a copyright date that is different from the publication date, but the actual publication date falls within the window of eligibility, please include a letter of explanation from the publisher.

Deadline: January 15, 2012

Submissions for the book prize should be sent to:

Serena Zabin

History Department, Leighton Hall

Carleton College

1 N College St,

Northfield, MN, 55057

For more information on the book prize please contact Serena Zabin at szabin@carleton.edu

Article Prize

We invite Journal Editors and Authors to submit articles published in the year 2011 for consideration for the Berkshire Conference Article Prizes. The Berkshire Conference now awards two Article Prizes. One prize is for an article in any field of history published in 2011 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. This prize is not restricted by field. The other prize is for an article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, published in 2011 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. If appropriate, an article will be considered for both prizes.

Deadline: January 15, 2012

Three (3) copies of the article should be sent to:

Faye Dudden

Department of History, 318 Alumni Hall

Colgate University

Hamilton, NY 13346

We can accept photo-copies, offprints of the article, or pdf’s attached to email. If you are sending copies or offprints, please send three. Do not send the entire journal in which the article appears. Information on previous years’ winners can be found at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ web site (www.berksconference.org). Articles may be nominated by journals or by the author herself; journals may nominate more than one article. Jointly published articles are acceptable, as are articles that have appeared in collections, but only if they were published for the first time in 2011. They must not be reprints of articles published in previous years. Journals should indicated in a cover letter that they are submitting articles for the prize competition, and include a contact phone number and e-mail address at the journal. Submissions coming directly from authors should contain a contact address (including e-mail) for the author. Winners are notified in early summer and will be publicly acknowledged in an official announcement on the Berkshire website and other public sites. The winning author shall also receive a $500 award.

For further information, please contact Faye Dudden at fdudden@colgate.edu.

In her thought-provoking and compelling article, Sherry L. Smith invites readers to consider how groups and nations can acknowledge monumental historical injustices and what role history and historians play. Focusing on the Native peoples of the American West, Smith asks whether reconciliation or restitution can begin to address the human rights abuses to which American Indians have been subjected. She offers no easy answers, but in a wide-ranging analysis of examples from across the globe and case studies from the history of the U.S. West, Smith outlines a variety of possible approaches and demonstrates that, on occasion and however imperfectly, people of good will have found ways to redress historical wrongs. Moreover, history has been a crucial element in the effort, as victims of human rights violations challenged existing narratives of the national story, and as historians validated those challenges. We applaud Sherry Smith for an article that tackles a big and important historical topic from a transnational perspective, with precisely rendered examples and thoughtful insights at every turn, all of it presented in appealing prose.

Congratulations to Christina Snyder, winner of the 2010 Book Prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for her Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010).

In a very impressive pool of first books, Christina Snyder’s Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America stands out for its bold argument, elegant prose, and subtle analysis. Snyder’s work completely overturns assumptions about slavery in the American South. The genesis of that region’s plantation slavery was not African slavery but rather that of native Americans. For hundreds of years, including the entire colonial era, Indian slavery in the south was based on ideas of kin rather than race. Even as racial slavery became increasingly common among white southerners, Indians’ notions of slavery remained relatively fluid. Only in the wake of large-scale political and economic crises at the turn of the nineteenth century did southern Indians begin to embrace the notion of racial slavery. This is a big book that convincingly explains an enormous shift in captivity and slavery. Yet even for non-specialists, this book has a lot to offer. Snyder is an excellent guide through the shifting intersections of captivity and race that mark southern slavery. She sensitively brings the reader into the cultural logic of southern Indian slavery. Finally, Slavery in Indian Country is beautifully written, especially in the multiple passages in which she impressively invokes both the richness and the horror of ritual.

An honorable mention to Jennifer Guglielmo, runner-up for the 2010 Book Prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians for her Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Jennifer Guglielmo’s book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) is an accomplished contribution to immigration, political, and gender history. Based on impressive research in both English and Italian sources, _Living the Revolution_ focuses on an under-studied group of women who shaped the political landscape not only of New York or of Italian-Americans from 1880-1954 but also of the politics of dissent all over the United States during that period. Guglielmo sensitively connects what we might today call “kitchen table politics” to street and organizational activism, usefully blurring the dividing line between public and private. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of the shifting racial identities of Italian immigrants in America; the participation of Italian women in transnational forms of anarchism and other radical politics; the cooperation with other women in the labor movement and industrial feminism; and the complicated reactions of Italian women to fascism. Over the generations that Guglielmo analyzes, Italian women both worked with men and through their own separate organizations in ways that reveal a great deal about gender and activism within the context of community organizing. The book does not shy away from confronting the ways in which the gradual recognition of their whiteness eventually led significant numbers of Italian-American women to protect their accrued white privilege through hostility toward racial others, especially African-Americans. The book is well-written, achieves a balanced focus on individuals, groups, and larger communities, and takes into account the large historiography on American women’s activism during the last decades of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.

Department of History

ARTS AND SCIENCE

New York University

The Department of History at New York University invites applications for a position in 19th-century US history, including transnational approaches. This is a full-time, tenure-track position at the level of assistant professor. Appointment will begin September 1, 2012, pending budgetary and administrative approval.

The department especially encourages applications from candidates working on slavery, foreign policy, gender, or, political economy. Please apply online at http://history.fas.nyu.edu/page/employment, via the “Employment Opportunities” link to submit a letter of application, cv, and three referees. We will begin reviewing applications on December 12, 2011.

NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Book Prize

Congratulations to Christina Snyder, winner of the 2010 Book Prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for her Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010).

The Berkshire Conference now awards two book prizes. One prize is for a first book in any field of history written by a woman who is normally resident in North America.  This prize is not restricted by historical field.  The other prize is also for a first book written by a woman normally resident in North America, but it will be awarded to a book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality.  Only one copy of a book needs to be submitted; if relevant, it will be considered for both prizes.  Textbooks, juveniles, documentary collections, fiction, poetry, and collections of essays are not eligible for either prize.

For this year’s competition, each entry must be published during the period January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2011.  If a book carries a copyright date that is different from the publication date, but the actual publication date falls within the window of eligibility, please include a letter of explanation from the publisher.

Deadline:  January 15, 2012

Submissions for the book prize should be sent to:

Serena Zabin

History Department, Leighton Hall

Carleton College

1 N College St,

Northfield, MN, 55057

For more information on the book prize please contact Serena Zabin at szabin@carleton.edu

Article Prize

Congratulations to Sherry L. Smith, winner of the Article Prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for 2010 for her “Reconciliation and Restitution in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly, 41 (Spring 2010): 4-25.

We invite Journal Editors and Authors to submit articles published in the year 2011 for consideration for the Berkshire Conference Article Prizes. The Berkshire Conference now awards two Article Prizes. One prize is for an article in any field of history published in 2011 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. This prize is not restricted by field. The other prize is for an article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, published in 2011 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. If appropriate, an article will be considered for both prizes.

Deadline:  January 15, 2012

Three (3) copies of the article should be sent to:

Faye Dudden

Department of History, 318 Alumni Hall

Colgate University

Hamilton, NY 13346

We can accept photo-copies, offprints of the article, or pdf’s attached to email. If you are sending copies or offprints, please send three. Do not send the entire journal in which the article appears. Information on previous years’ winners can be found at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ web site (www.berksconference.org). Articles may be nominated by journals or by the author herself; journals may nominate more than one article. Jointly published articles are acceptable, as are articles that have appeared in collections, but only if they were published for the first time in 2011. They must not be reprints of articles published in previous years. Journals should indicated in a cover letter that they are submitting articles for the prize competition, and include a contact phone number and e-mail address at the journal. Submissions coming directly from authors should contain a contact address (including e-mail) for the author. Winners are notified in early summer and will be publicly acknowledged in an official announcement on the Berkshire website and other public sites. The winning author shall also receive a $500 award.

For further information, please contact Faye Dudden at fdudden@colgate.edu.

Sherry L. Smith, “Reconciliation and Restitution in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly, 41 (Spring 2010): 4-25.

In her thought-provoking and compelling article, Sherry L. Smith invites readers to consider how groups and nations can acknowledge monumental historical injustices and what role history and historians play. Focusing on the Native peoples of the American West, Smith asks whether reconciliation or restitution can begin to address the human rights abuses to which American Indians have been subjected. She offers no easy answers, but in a wide-ranging analysis of examples from across the globe and case studies from the history of the U.S. West, Smith outlines a variety of possible approaches and demonstrates that, on occasion and however imperfectly, people of good will have found ways to redress historical wrongs. Moreover, history has been a crucial element in the effort, as victims of human rights violations challenged existing narratives of the national story, and as historians validated those challenges. We applaud Sherry Smith for an article that tackles a big and important historical topic from a transnational perspective, with precisely rendered examples and thoughtful insights at every turn, all of it presented in appealing prose.

Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010)

In a very impressive pool of first books, Christina Snyder’s Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America stands out for its bold argument, elegant prose, and subtle analysis. Snyder’s work completely overturns assumptions about slavery in the American South. The genesis of that region’s plantation slavery was not African slavery but rather that of native Americans. For hundreds of years, including the entire colonial era, Indian slavery in the south was based on ideas of kin rather than race. Even as racial slavery became increasingly common among white southerners, Indians’ notions of slavery remained relatively fluid. Only in the wake of large-scale political and economic crises at the turn of the nineteenth century did southern Indians begin to embrace the notion of racial slavery. This is a big book that convincingly explains an enormous shift in captivity and slavery. Yet even for non-specialists, this book has a lot to offer. Snyder is an excellent guide through the shifting intersections of captivity and race that mark southern slavery. She sensitively brings the reader into the cultural logic of southern Indian slavery. Finally, Slavery in Indian Country is beautifully written, especially in the multiple passages in which she impressively invokes both the richness and the horror of ritual.

Honorable Mention: Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Jennifer Guglielmo’s book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) is an accomplished contribution to immigration, political, and gender history. Based on impressive research in both English and Italian sources, _Living the Revolution_ focuses on an under-studied group of women who shaped the political landscape not only of New York or of Italian-Americans from 1880-1954 but also of the politics of dissent all over the United States during that period. Guglielmo sensitively connects what we might today call “kitchen table politics” to street and organizational activism, usefully blurring the dividing line between public and private. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of the shifting racial identities of Italian immigrants in America; the participation of Italian women in transnational forms of anarchism and other radical politics; the cooperation with other women in the labor movement and industrial feminism; and the complicated reactions of Italian women to fascism. Over the generations that Guglielmo analyzes, Italian women both worked with men and through their own separate organizations in ways that reveal a great deal about gender and activism within the context of community organizing. The book does not shy away from confronting the ways in which the gradual recognition of their whiteness eventually led significant numbers of Italian-American women to protect their accrued white privilege through hostility toward racial others, especially African-Americans. The book is well-written, achieves a balanced focus on individuals, groups, and larger communities, and takes into account the large historiography on American women’s activism during the last decades of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.

2009

Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

2008

Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2008).

Susanne Freidberg, “The Triumph of the Egg,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008).

What is a “fresh” egg and how did Americans’ imaginings of what constituted a “naturally” fresh egg change over the the twentieth century? Reminding us that eggs were once a seasonal crop available primarily in the spring from local family farmers, Susanne Freidberg historicizes the concept of freshness through a focus on changes in the production and marketing of eggs. From early twentieth-century cold storage techniques which allowed eggs to be sold as “fresh” months after they were laid to New Deal era electrification projects which modernized hen houses, altering the birds’ life cycles, Freidberg traces the efforts of producers and marketers to have a year round supply of eggs, and of consumers to ensure fair prices and healthier standards. Engineering “seasonless freshness,” Freidberg argues, increasingly came to depend not so much on manipulating the egg after it left the hen house and more on manipulating the hens who produced them. Tracing the technological changes that eventually made hens “full-time, year-round workers” and egg production big business, pushing out many small farmers, Freidberg deftly pulls together histories of food production, food commerce, food consumption, civic activism, and regulatory change. Freidberg tells a story of the chicken and the egg which entwines what is happening in hen houses and in family kitchens with developments in research labs, warehouses and retail markets, and legislative chambers. The result is both a history of scientific changes and a fine social and cultural analysis which encourages us to wonder about our own conceptions of freshness in the contemporary global food market and provides a model of history study both methodologically sophisticated and marvelously engaging.

2007

Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)

Peace Came in the Form of a Woman is a beautifully written and scrupulously researched study of the gendered nature of interactions between indigenous groups and Spaniards in the Texas region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Barr argues that those interactions were shaped by native kinship patterns more than by European racial categories, and were governed by the gender ideals of each. Our committee especially appreciated Barr’s ability to depict indigenous perspectives on their encounter with the Spanish in their own right, and without anticipating the formation and arrival of the United States. Andrea Friedman, “The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism,” Journal of American History 94 (2007), 445-68. Andrea Friedman’s compelling article about an African-American army clerk and widowed single mother, who faced the loss of her job when called to testify in 1954 before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations, artfully connects one woman’s life to the complex political and ideological forces at play in American politics in the years after World War II. In lucid prose, and deftly deploying a multi-leveled analysis of gender, race and class iconography and politics, Friedman illuminates how limited were the possibilities for imagining the citizenship of African American women during the Cold War era.

2006

Sandra Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (University of Illinois Press, 2006)

Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 Summer 2006

2005

Srirupa Roy, ‘A Symbol of Freedom: The Indian Flag and the Transformations of Nationalism, 1906-2002,” The Journal of Asian Studies 65. no. 3 (August 2006) 2005

Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of the Eighteenth Century Britons (Oxford University Press, 2005)

2004

Wang Zheng, “‘State Feminism’? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies, vol 31, no 3 (Fall 2005): 519-551. 2004

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)

Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004)

Toby L. Ditz, “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,” Gender & History 16:1(2004): 1-35

2003

Sally McKee, “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete,” Past & Present 182 (2004): 31-53. 2003

Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846-1948 (Duke University Press, 2003)

2002

Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108:1 (February 2003): 84-118. 2002

Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Duke University Press, 2003)

Samantha Power, A Problem of Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002)

Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28:2 (2002): 271-301.

2001

Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791 (Duke University Press, 2001)

2000

Sharon Marcus, “Haussmannization as Anti-Modernity: The Apartment House in Parisian Urban Discourse, 1850-1880,” Journal of Urban History 27:6 (2001) 2000

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia University Press, 2000)

Nancy Caciola, “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe” Comparative Studies in Society and History

1999

Heidi Tinsman, (Honorable mention) “Reviving Feminist Materialism: Gender and Neoliberalism in Pinochet’s Chile” Signs. 1999

Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution 1868-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)

Lisa A. Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference: Male Breadwinners, Working Women, and Colonial Citizenship in the 1945 Nigerian General Strike,” American Historical Review 104:3 (1999)

Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries and Blood: Medicalization and Nation Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79:1 (1999)

1998

Jill Lepore, Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf/Random House, 1998)

Julia A. Thomas, “Photography, National Identity, and the ‘Cataract of Times’: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan,” The American Historical Review (December 1998).

1997

Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997)

Dorothy Ko, “The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth Century China,” The Journal of Women’s History (Winter 1997).

1996

Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Cornell University Press, 1996)

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

[honorable mention] Antoinette Burton, “A ‘Pilgrim Reformer’ in the Heart of the Empire: Behrami Malabari in Late-Victorian London,” Gender and History (August 1996) 
 Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History (June 1996)

1995

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (Yale University Press, 1995)

Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past and Present (November 1995)

1994

Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Free Press, 1994)

Hitomi Tonomura, “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan,” American Historical Review (February 1994).

1993

Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (University North Carolina, 1993)

Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936

Norma Basch, “Marriage, Morals and Politics in the Election of 1828,” Journal of American History (December 1993).

1992

Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in 17th Century England (University of California, 1992)

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs (Winter 1992).

1991

Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991)

Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (1991)

Patricia J. Hilden, “The Rhetoric and Iconography of Reform: Women Coal Miners in Belgium, 1840-1914,” The Historical Journal (March 1990).

1990

Jo Burr Margadent, Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic (1990)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812

Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and Narratives of War,” Journal of American History (March 1990)

Nancy Rose Hunt, “Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946-1960,” Signs (Spring 1990)

New York University has established itself as a Global Network University, a multi-site, organically connected network encompassing key global cities and idea capitals. The network has three foundational, degree-granting campuses: New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai, complemented by a network of more than 15 research and study-away sites across five continents. Faculty and students will circulate within this global network in pursuit of common research interests, the promotion of cross-cultural understanding and solutions for problems, both local and global.

Entering its second year, NYU Abu Dhabi has already recruited a cohort of faculty who are at once distinguished in their research and teaching. Our first two classes of students are drawn from around the world and surpass all traditional recruitment benchmarks, both US and global. NYU Abu Dhabi’s highly selective liberal arts enterprise is complemented by an institute for advanced research, sponsoring cutting-edge projects across the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences, and Engineering.

The terms of employment are competitive and include housing and educational subsidies for children. Faculty may also spend time at NYU New York and other sites of the global network, engaging in both research and teaching opportunities. The appointment might begin as soon as September 1, 2012, or could be delayed until September 1, 2013.

The review of applications will begin on December 1, 2011. Applicants need to submit a curriculum vitae, statement of research and teaching interests, representative publications and three letters of reference in PDF format to be considered. Please visit our website at http://nyuad.nyu.edu/human.resources/open.positions.html for instructions and other information on how to apply. If you have any questions, please e-mail nyuad.humanities@nyu.edu.

NYU Abu Dhabi is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

The jury’s citation reads:

“In her thought-provoking and compelling article, Sherry L. Smith invites readers to consider how groups and nations can acknowledge monumental historical injustices and what role history and historians play.  Focusing on the Native peoples of the American West, Smith asks whether reconciliation or restitution can begin to address the human rights abuses to which American Indians have been subjected.  She offers no easy answers, but in a wide-ranging analysis of examples from across the globe and case studies from the history of the U.S. West, Smith outlines a variety of possible approaches and demonstrates that, on occasion and however imperfectly, people of good will have found ways to redress historical wrongs.  Moreover, history has been a crucial element in the effort, as victims of human rights violations challenged existing narratives of the national story, and as historians validated those challenges.  We applaud Sherry Smith for an article that tackles a big and important historical topic from a transnational perspective, with precisely rendered examples and thoughtful insights at every turn, all of it presented in appealing prose.”

Warmest congratulations to Sherry L. Smith for her important scholarship.

We will then turn to a presentation on the Montreal Life Stories project at Concordia University (http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/), with two of its participants speaking on their respective roles and projects within this well-funded and ambitious enterprise. Anna Sheftel will discuss her experiences working with survivors of mass violence who tell their stories, including Holocaust survivors and victims of violence in the former Yugoslavia. Her research also took her to Bihać, a city in the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 2005, to research wartime memory in the region, and she will speak as well on the lessons learned there about the political and ethical potential of oral history. One of the founding members, and committee coordinators, of the Montreal Life Stories project, Lisa Ndejuru has also been centrally involved in the Rwandan working group and with various performance-based workshops that draw on oral narratives and experiment with different ways of creating dialogue around such difficult stories. In addition to discussing those efforts, she will also talk about getting these stories into the high school curriculum by highlighting a learning module on genocide that drew on a Rwandan graphic artist’s work. This promises to be an informative and intellectually engaging, and also emotionally moving, evening. We hope it will inspire others to speak about their own efforts at using oral and digital storytelling methods to educate and empower those in the classroom and beyond it.

Please check out the resort website at http://www.gideonputnam.com

Our Friday night keynote speaker Claudia Koonz from Duke University will take us into the media world with images and news headlines in her talk on: “Muslim Headscarves: a Human Right or a Menace to Western Civilization.” Nadia Jones-Gailani, a PhD student at the University of Toronto completing a dissertation on Iraqi women in North America, will complement Claudia’s talk with a presentation, entitled, “The Hijab in Canada: Practice and Politics,” which will draw on her research on and interviews with Iraqi Muslim women in Toronto and Canada and what wearing a hijab means for them. Saturday night will feature an exploration of Digital History.

To register for the conference, please send an email to Kathi Kern: kern@uky.edu

To reserve a room, call the resort at 518-584-3000 or toll free 866-746-1077. Ask for Reservations Department. Our Group Code is: 9N3016 (also supply group name Berkshire Conference of Women Historians). Rooms must be reserved by OCTOBER 3RD.

The room rate is $149.00. (This does not include food. Menu choices and food costs will be sent to you once you have registered for the conference.) The Berkshire Conference will underwrite room and board up to 50% for graduate students and 30% for untenured faculty who do not have access to institutional travel funds for this meeting. Please contact Kathi Kern if you will be seeking financial support from the Berks to attend this meeting.

If you have already booked a room, please email kern@uky.edu. Please let us know as well if you are seeking a roommate.

Looking forward to seeing you in Saratoga Springs!