Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Continuities and Changes
June 12-15, 2008

• Call for Papers • Seminars • FAQ • Proposal Submission•

 

Submission Deadline Extended until February 9, 2007

 

SEMINAR LIST

.

 

1. Jean Allman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Fashioning Power:   Gender, Identity and the Politics of Dress

Because of its strategic positioning between the individual and the social world, dress has functioned historically as a powerful language able to unify, differentiate, challenge, contest, and dominate.  This seminar is concerned with sartorial praxis as political praxis, with the ways in which gender, identity, and power have been historically represented, articulated and contested through dress.

 

2. Judith Bennett, University of Southern California, and Susan Mann, University of California, Davis

Singlewomen

 

This seminar seeks to explore the histories of "singlewomen"--that is women who did not marry or otherwise enter into their society's conventional form of partnership with men. Some were "lifecycle singlewomen," because they did eventually marry; others were "lifelong singlewomen" who died without ever having contracted a legitimate partnership with a man. Both sorts are the subject of this seminar to which papers from all world regions and chronological eras are invited.

Two caveats:

a. In some times and places (medieval Europe is one example), some never-married women had distinctive and well-defined career opportunities within religious institutions.  This seminar, while not ignoring these religious roles for singlewomen, will focus particularly on singlewomen in the secular world--their work, their personal lives, their sexualities, their friends and families, their social roles, and their representations in cultural media.

b. In some times and places (late imperial China is one example), the family system made single status for women exceedingly rare, capturing virtually all women in a legitimate partnership with a man at some point in the life cycle, through marriage or concubinage.  This makes the pursuit of singlewoman status in and of itself a phenomenon worth study, regardless of its secular or religious meanings.  In other times and places (Tokugawa Japan is one example), the family system ensured that many women would develop and sustain a life as a singlewoman, through entrepreneurship, manual labor, or religious calling.

 

We expect, in other words, that our seminar will produce cross-cultural insights into family, sexuality, and gender relations that are not limited to the singlewomen we study.

 

3. Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Colonialism, Sexuality and the Body

   Colonialism, sexuality and the body: recent work in colonial history and postcolonial studies has leant empirical depth and some theoretical insight to the problem of the body and of sexuality in the context of colonialism, but more remains to be done -- especially to produce histories which move beyond the body as surface or vessel, which ask what the body means to indigenous and colonized peoples before and beyond their encounters with imperial power, and which re-suture the domains of intimacy (whether through social or sexual intercourse) to embodied subjects in specific historical time and space.  Submissions may be think-pieces or research papers, modern or early modern, historical or interdisciplinary.

 

 

4.  Sandra McGee Deutsch, University of Texas at El Paso, and Kathleen M. Blee, University of Pittsburgh

Women and Right Wing Political Movements

This seminar will explore why women joined the right and which women did so.  What were the class, religious, gender, racial/ethnic, ideological, and/or transnational factors that helped impel women into rightist movements?  Did women of lower-class and minority backgrounds affiliate, and if so, under what circumstances.

 

5.  Estelle Freedman, Stanford University

Historicizing Sexual Violence

      In 1975, when Susan Brownmiller pronounced in Against Our Will that rape had been a central force in human history and key to the oppression of women, few historians had written about the subject of sexual violence.  In the past decades, however, historians have been analyzing the changing definitions, prosecutions, and cultural representations of rape, domestic violence, and child assault.  This seminar will explore new historical approaches to sexual violence, including the methodological challenges of studying the crime of rape; the intersections of race, class, and sexuality in this history; and the theoretical contexts for understanding sexual and gender violence across cultures.

 

6. Charlotte Furth, University of Southern California

What is the History of the Body?  

Today the history of the body seems everywhere, and its popularity could be a sign that feminist approaches to history are now in the mainstream. As my own research on the history of medicine and gender in pre-modern China (cf A Flourishing Yin: Gender and China's Medical History 960-1665) came to be influenced by the project of body history, it added to my excitement in producing it, and expanded my audience as well.   However, this has also raised for me questions about the epistemological assumptions, research objectives and thematic boundaries of historical scholarship that takes 'the body' as its topic.

 

The seminar invites scholars to think about what we mean by history of the body from the point of view of their own research. This research need not -- in fact should not -- privilege medical history, but could come from historians working on histories of art, literature, religion, labor, or other domains as well. The aim is not to present a scholarly example of  'body history' for its own sake, but to reflect on how taking 'the body' as a subject  has emerged onto the landscape of your own field,  and what promises/attractions as well as perils/dangers engaging with it entails. 

 

 

7. Monica Green, Arizona State University

Gendering Women's Medicine

The history of women's medicine -- both medicine for women and medicine as practiced by women -- developed early in the second-wave feminist movement and it has remained a thriving subdiscipline of the field.  Yet precisely because it developed before the concept of 'gender' was fully fleshed out, there are some ways in which the questions asked have perhaps not sufficiently interrogated how we, as historians, negotiate this realm of thought and practice where society and culture (gender) hit up hard against the physical body (sex).  This seminar will seek to explore still-neglected questions and texts, moving out beyond the Western tradition to ask if women's objectives in controlling their health and bodily functioning (e.g., their desire for contraception) are 'universal' and, if not, whether any analytical methods, either historical or anthropological, seem suited to capturing and explaining that diversity.

 

 

8. Martha Howell and Jean Howard, Columbia University

Managing Property, Constructing Gender

 

We invite papers examining how gender meanings and gender relations are constructed as property is imagined, represented, claimed, and deployed. We encourage submissions from specialists working in any period, in any location, but we are particularly interested in contributions that are methodologically interdisciplinary, drawing not just from history and literary studies (our disciplines) but  also perhaps from allied fields in the social sciences and humanities. 

 

9. Margaret Hunt, Amherst College, and Mary Ann Fay, American University

Women and the Law Courts in Global Historical Perspective

  

Recent scholarship has undermined received assumptions about the historical superiority of European legal systems, especially with respect to women and status inferiors (for instance, slaves).  So, for example, women living under Islamic law resorted earlier and in larger numbers to the law courts than women in Western and Central Europe.  Both married and single women enjoyed more clearly defined property rights than most Western European women.  And a wider range of women (including slaves) had legal standing to litigate. What happens when one abandons the assumption that any one set of legal traditions ('Western' or otherwise) is "better" for women? We invite scholars with an interest in this question who are working on women and the law courts (particularly actual litigation by women) in any historical period and any region of the world, to submit applications to join this seminar.  Possible topics include but are not limited to: women's access to the law courts, women's legal knowledge, which kinds of women have the legal standing to litigate against which kinds of men or women, the kinds of issues of greatest concern to women litigants, structural and informal impediments and incitements to women litigating, and change (for better or worse) over time. Papers written from a comparative perspective are welcome.

 

 

10. Stanlie M. James, Arizona State University

Human Rights and the Problem of Bodily Integrity

 

Just as the second half of the twentieth century saw the development of contemporary international Human Rights and its feminist critique that Women's Rights are Human Rights, the ongoing task of the twenty-first century is to refine our understanding of Women's Rights in a manner that will inform the development of a diversified holistic conceptualization of international human rights.  One critical aspect of this endeavor is the development of the idea of Women's Right to Bodily Integrity which developed out of, but is not confined to, a recognition of the global pandemic of violence against women and the girl child.  This seminar should focus on identifying, exploring and analyzing the historical development of some of the key elements central to the concept of Bodily Integrity.  This would include such ideas as freedom of movement, security of person and tracing the conceptualization and acknowledgment of rape as a war crime, for example, which arise specifically from the international human rights community's growing emphasis on the pandemic of violence as recently elaborated in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.  Other issues that might be a focus for this panel could be the evolution of the struggle for reproductive rights into a movement for reproductive justice; and the impact of technological transformations which include the new and relatively unregulated frontiers of reproductive and genetic biotechnologies and their impact upon on an expansive feminist understanding of the right to bodily integrity.

 

11. Barbara Molony, Santa Clara University, and Louise Edwards, Institute
for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney
Gendering of "Rights"

Suffragism, reproductive freedoms, marriage equality, maternalism, labor protectionism, and citizenship have all been grounded in "rights."  How have rights been gendered in differing historical contexts? Is rights-talk a Western discourse with recent international derivatives, or are there important variants throughout the world? How are rights gendered in colonial and post-colonial contexts? To what extent are class and ethnicity imbricated with gender in the construction and application of rights? Papers dealing with these or other aspects of rights are welcome!

 

12. Jennifer Morgan, New York University

Gender and Slavery in Early America

Recent scholarship has challenged the conventional historiography of slavery that had deemed enslaved women and questions of gender marginal to the experience of slavery in the Americas. This seminar solicits new research on the workings of gender in slave societies and the experiences of enslaved women. Issues of particular interest include the gendered dimensions of labor, race and reproduction, gender and the slave trade, culture and creolisation, and gender and resistance.

 

13.  Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University

Gender and Politics in the Early Modern Atlantic World

 

Scholars of American and European women's history in the 19th and 20th centuries have explored the relationships of women, men, and politics (largely through women's quest for the rights of citizenship, including suffrage) in great detail. But what of women, men, and politics in the three centuries before 1800? What were women's relationships to the public sphere? How were men's and women's political roles understood in the early modern Atlantic world? This seminar aims to address such questions and others of related interest.

 

 

14. Claire Robertson, Ohio State University

Oral History:  Women, Families and Communities

Papers for this session should address issues concerning methodological interfaces of oral history,  women, families and communities, as well as new perspectives on how local history contributes to modifying national or international historical discourses concerning women and gender. Comparative studies are also welcome.

 

15. Vicki Ruiz, University of California, Irvine, and Virginia Sanchez-Korrol, Brooklyn College

Latinas in the Americas, 1492-the present

 

Whether carving out a community in St. Augustine in 1565 to reflecting on colonialism and liberty during the 1890s to fighting for civil rights through the courts of the 1940s, Latinas have made history within and beyond national borders.  In addition to first-stage recovery research, what theoretical frameworks illuminate the rich layering of nationalities, generations, and experiences, encompassing both transhemispheric and community perspectives? This seminar would reflect on the state of the field, in general, and more specifically on emerging trends within the last five years.

 

16. Bonnie Smith, Rutgers University

Routes: Scholarship on Women in the 'New' World History.  

 

This seminar focuses on scholarship on world history that focuses on global movement, contact, and exchange.  Often, except for studies in migration, women don't fit into the current paradigm of "men in ships".   This seminar seeks to bring together scholars who are trying to reframe and transform existing paradigms of movement and contact by understanding how the inclusion of women, and attention to gender, changes them. 

 

17.  Beverly Lemire, University of Alberta, and Laurel Ulrich, Harvard University

Object-centered History

When used as primary sources, artifacts can transform rather than merely illustrate historical understanding. This seminar solicits papers that demonstrate the power of object-centered research. We welcome methodological   papers as well as well-developed case studies in any historical period and in any part of the world. Projects that show intercultural appropriation and exchange are especially welcome.

 

18. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Women's History and World History

Women's/gender history and world/global history have both developed over the last thirty years as, in part, revisionist interpretations arguing that the standard story needs to be made broader and much more complex; both have been viewed by those hostile or disinterested as 'having an agenda.' Despite these similarities, there have been relatively few interchanges or confluences, though this is changing. This seminar seeks participants who are bringing the two together in research or teaching projects, and particularly those who are transforming world/global history from one of their teaching fields into a research field.

 

 

19. Judith Zinsser, Miami University of Ohio

Women's Biographies:  Old Stories, New Trends

Biography as a genre of historical writing is enjoying a popular revival. It remains, however, almost exclusively the traditional narrative of familiar men's lives and curiously immune to the rich contemporary trends in history and biography, particularly those initiated by scholars and writers with a feminist or gender perspective. This seminar will explore some of the new approaches to biography initiated from a feminist and gender perspective and the particular issues faced by women's as opposed to men's biographers, European and North American vs. Latin American, Eastern and South Asian, and African biographers of women.