Program Berks

2023 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

Oceans, Islands, and Continents:
Reconceptualizing the Spatialization of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Histories

Wednesday 28 June

2:00 – 6:30 pm Registration (Graham Hall)
12:00 – 1:00 pm Lunch
7:00 – 8:30 pm Reception for International Participants and Friends (Graham Lawn)

Thursday 29 June

7:00 – 8:00 am Breakfast
12:00 – 6:00 pm Registration (Graham Hall)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Berks Fellows Roundtable
1:30 – 3:00 pm Western Association of Women Historians: Executive Board Meeting
3:00 – 4:00 pm Annual Business Meeting of the Western Association of Women Historians
3:00 – 4:00 pm Graduate Council Meet and Greet
4:00 – 4:00 pm Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Annual Meeting
5:30 – 6:45 pm Opening Presidential Reception (with hearty hors d’oeuvres)
7:00 – 9:00 pm Presidential Opening Plenary

Presidential Opening Plenary

This plenary will officially open the conference with a Land Acknowledgement and Blessing:

Charlene C. Nijmeh, Chairwoman, Muwekma Ohlone Tribe
Monica V. Arellano, Vice Chairwoman, Muwekma Ohlone Tribe
Gloria E. Arellano-Gomez, Tribal Member, Muwekma Ohlone Tribe

Welcomes from Santa Clara University Acting Provost, Kate Morris, and Amy Randall, History Department Chair.
The keynote speaker will be announced soon.

Friday 30 June

7:00 – 9:00 am Breakfast
8:00 am – 6:00 pm Registration
8:30 – 10:00 am Sessions
9:00 am – 5:00 pm Film Viewing
10:00-10:30 am Coffee Break
10:30 am – noon Sessions
12:00 – 2:00 pm Lunch
2:00 – 3:30 pm Sessions
3:30 – 4:00 pm Coffee Break
4:00 – 5:30 pm Indigeneity Plenary

Plenary: “Planting Good Relations: New Directions in Indigenous Feminist Scholarship”
The plenary brings together three rising stars in Indigenous Feminist scholarship to talk about their work which collectively helps us understand past and present gendered forms of settler colonialism. They also offer us windows into how many Indigenous peoples resist colonial modes of being in the world. Together, their critical insights offer everyone different ways of thinking about how to be in good relations with the lands we live on, as well as the Indigenous communities we live with.

“Repairing Relations: Communal Frameworks for Native History”
Caitlin Keliiaa, University of California, Berkeley
“Oceanian Feminisms, Rematriation and Protecting the Sacred”
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, University of California, Davis
“Oceans of Empathy: Indigenous Kinship and Gendered Settler Grief in the Salish Sea”
Lindsay Schneider, Colorado State University

Chair: Maile Arvin, University of Utah

5.30 – 6:45 pm 50th Anniversary Celebration Reception with hearty hors d’oeurves
7:00 – 9:00 pm 50th Anniversary Celebration (Meyer Theater, overflow in the Recital Hall)

50th Anniversary Celebration Plenary: “We Have Changed History: A Celebration”

“Remembering the Little Berks
Sandi Cooper, Prof. emerita, City University of New York
“Women in the Profession before the 70s”
Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University
“Conceiving the Big Berks”
Mary Hartman, Rutgers University (retired), and Lois W. Banner, University of Southern California
“The Early Days”
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan
“The Berks Experience in Photographs”
Kathryn Kish Sklar, State University of New York, Binghamton
“Comparative History”
Karen Offen, Stanford University
“Politics and Peace”
Blanche Wiesen Cook, City University of New York
“Labor”
Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine
“Transnationalism”
Teresa Meade, Union College, New York, and Bonnie Anderson, City University of New York, emerita
“Race and Ethnicity”
Deirdre Cooper Owens
“Sexuality”
Estelle Freedman, Stanford University
“Social Welfare”
Linda Gordon, New York University
“Archives and Preservation”
Heather Huyck, National Collaboration of Women’s History Sites
“Towards the future, with a Focus on Race and Labor”
Thavolia Glymph, Duke University

Co-Chairs: Alice Kessler-Harris and Mary Beth Norton

Saturday 1 July

7:00 – 9:00 am Breakfast
8:00 – 4:00 pm Registration
8:30 – 10:00 am Sessions
9:00 am – 5:00 pm Film Viewing
10:00 – 10.30 am Coffee Break
10:30 am – noon Sessions
12:00 – 2:00 pm Journal of Women’s History Annual Meeting
12:00 – 2:00 pm Lunch
2:00 – 3:30 pm Sessions
3:30 – 4:00 pm Coffee Break
4:00 – 5.30 pm Plenary — Oceans, Islands, and Continents

Plenary: “Oceans, Islands, and Continents: Reconceptualizing the Spacialization of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Histories”
Held on the edge of the Pacific, the 2023 Berkshires conference invites us to consider how we might interrogate nation-bound and land-bound forms of history.
How might a consideration of the relationship between different scales of land and water foreground imperial, environmental, racialized, diasporic, and indigenous understandings of geography, culture, and society?
How does the study of women, gender, and sexuality history shift if we consider the local as well as the migratory, the ecological as well as the geopolitical, the oceanic as well as the hemispheric?
How does an awareness of trans-border and intra-border spatialization change our historical questions and analysis?
Please join our plenary as we explore these questions through gendered analyses of oceans, islands, and continents.

“Navigating Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas”
Theresa Delgadillo, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Oceanic Kinships and Feminist Dis/Loyalties”
Vernadette Gonzalez, University of Hawaii, Manoa
“Multiracial Internationalism: Remaking Childhood, Family, and Citizenship in Twentieth Century France and French West and Equatorial Africa”
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, University of California, Davis
“Activating Indigenous Feminist Futurity”
Laura Harjo, Oklahoma University, Norman, OK