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 2007 will be considered. The following categories are not eligible for consideration: textbooks, juveniles, documentary collections, or collections of essays. Submissions must be made before January 15, 2008. 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 2007 by a woman who is normally resident in North America. Articles need not focus on women's history. Submissions must be made before January 15, 2008. 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:
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.
In "Bolshevism, Patriarchy and the Nation," Adrienne Edgar shows that Central Asian Muslims under Soviet rule came to regard their family and religious traditions as central to their cultural and national identities in the face of the Soviet onslaught. Because the Soviet state was a multi-ethnic, universalizing Socialist state, Edgar argues, female emancipation and nationalism in Central Asia came to be seen as opposed to each other instead of forming mutually supportive components of modernity. In contrast, she shows, independent Muslim regimes in Turkey and Iran had national legitimacy that enabled them to develop policies that emancipated women in ways that the popularce of these countries could accept and embrace.
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).
In "A Symbol of Freedom," Srirupa Roy talks about the journey of Indian nationalist flags over a century. By charting the shifting images of the Indian flag and terms of debate over the flag, Srirupa Roy enables us to understand the formations and transformations of Indian national ideology and practice. The committee felt that this article was worthy of the prize also because it has resonance beyond the subject matter it addresss. Roy provides, in her analysis of material culture to illuminate political shifts, a useful methodology and conceptual framework for scholars and students of state formation and national identities anywhere in the world.
2005 Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of the Eighteenth Centruy Britons (Oxford University Press)
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).