2027 Program Chairs & Review Committee

Marie Grace Brown

Associate Professor & Hall Professor of British History, University of Kansas

Marie Grace Brown is an award-winning author and internationally recognized historian of gender, empire, and modern Sudan. Her first book, Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (2017), presents the body-as-historical text to give a history of northern Sudanese women’s lives under British imperial rule and was named by The Guardian as one of the Top Ten Books on Sudan. Brown’s work has appeared in Gender & History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Women’s History and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. She first presented at the Berks in 2017 at Hofstra University.

Michelle McKinley

Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law, University of Oregon Law School

Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 was published by Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Legal History series in 2016. The monograph examines enslaved women in colonial Lima who used ecclesiastical and civil courts to litigate their claims to liberty. McKinley’s current project explores the transatlantic itineraries of Afro-Iberian women and children who moved to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her first “Big Berks” was in Toronto in 2014.

Nick Syrett

Professor & Chair, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nick Syrett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the coeditor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. A specialist in the history of gender, sexuality, and childhood in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, he is the coeditor of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (with Corinne T. Field) and author of four books: The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (2009); American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (2016); An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton (2021); and The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023). He was a co-chair of the LGBTQ+ History Association and is past president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth. He first presented at the Berks in 2005 at Scripps College.

Jennifer D. Thibodeaux

Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Jennifer D. Thibodeaux is a historian of medieval Europe who studies gender, women, and masculinity. Her first book, an edited volume, Negotiating Clerical Identities (Palgrave, 2010) set the historiographical framework for the study of clerical masculinity in the medieval Church. Her first monograph, The Manly Priest (Penn Press, 2015) won the Best First Book Prize from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship in 2016. She has previously served as the General Editor for the journal Medieval Feminist Forum, and has reviewed manuscripts for Gender and History, Church History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, among others. Her first trade book, a story of a medieval woman’s pursuit of justice for a sexual assault, is forthcoming from Godine in Fall 2026. She is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.