Annual Book & Article Prizes
Book Prize:
The Berkshire Conference First Book Prize, which carries a $1000 award, is a prize for a first book in any field of history written by a woman who is normally resident in North America. Books need not focus on women's history. Only books published in 2008 will be considered. The following categories are not eligible for consideration: textbooks, juveniles, documentary collections, or collections of essays. Submissions must be made before February, 2009. Please do not send any submissions to the Berkshire Conference main address.
Directions for submitting books for the Berkshire Conference First Book Prize
Article Prize:
The Berkshire Conference Article Prize, which carries a $500 award, is awarded for an article in any field of history published in 2008 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. Articles need not focus on women's history. Submissions must be made before February 1, 2009. Please do not send any submissions to the Berkshire Conference main address.
Directions for submitting articles for the Berkshire Article Prize.
Prize recipients are generally notified in early Summer of the next calendar year
Previous Berkshire Prize Winners:
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 – a time when McCarthyism and the new discourse of racial liberalism flourished, when black masculinity and military service shaped constructions of loyalty and citizenship, when a white suburban housewife found herself infiltrating “subversive” organizations for the FBI, and when white male politicians positioned themselves as protectors of working-class black people’s aspirations to middle-class status. Moving beyond the accepted public image of Moss as a “hapless victim” and revealing these many narratives in play, Friedman explores the turbulent social contexts that Moss confronted. This article exposes not only the roots of Moss as “symbol,” but also as political subject who, even as she navigated the existing racial, gender and social hierarchies, could not escape their constraining force.
2006 Sandra Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and 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 and Srirupa Roy, 'A Symbol of Freedom: The Indian Flag and the Transformatios 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 Centruy Britons (Oxford University Press, 2005)
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; and Ruth Rogaski, Hygenic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, University of California Press.
Toby L. Ditz for "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, and Sally McKee, for "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).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)
Samantha Power, "A Problem of Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books; (Paperback:HarperCollins Perennial)
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.
2001Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791 (Duke University Press)
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) and Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia University Press)
Nancy Caciola, "Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe" Comparative Studies in Society and History and 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)
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) and 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).
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).
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). We also awarded a special honorable mention to Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (University of North Carolina Press).
Antoinette Burton, "A 'Pilgrim Reformer' in the Heart of the Empire: Behrami Malabari in Late-Victorian London," Gender and History (August 1996) and 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).
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
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 and 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
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 and Nancy Leyes Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America
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 and 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) and Nancy Rose Hunt, "Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura's Foyer Social, 1946-1960," Signs (Spring 1990).