I’m back!  In light of Historiann’s absence from the Berks – and needless to say, she was missed by many – her faithful conference reporter Classy Claude is happy to offer readers a snapshot of one conference-goer’s experience. Obviously a conference is different for different people, depending on sessions attended and so forth, but I will recount some highlights. 

This Berks quite literally got off to start with a bang.  There was a crazy thunderous storm on Thursday afternoon (hail in some places!) as the first sessions were getting underway, as many attendees were taking advantage of tours through local historical sites, and as Classy Claude was doing a little work at the Sophia Smith Collection at nearby Smith College.  All of these opportunities had been coordinated with, or organized by, the conference planners.  Thus, one real highlight of the conference was the opportunity to take advantage of these nearby historic sites and local archives. 

The conference was located on the UMass-Amherst campus, primarily in the Campus Center, which itself houses a hotel (where many of us stayed, though rumor has it that rooms booked up quickly) and was connected via various passageways to the Student Union and a parking garage.  Because the weather was rainy on a couple days (Saturday also), this had the effect of making sessions not in the central complex more sparsely attended.  I found this to be so in a session I chaired and one I attended about young women and premarital pregnancy (which included Historiann’s blogging pal, Knitting Clio). 

The first night featured a reception on the top floor of the Campus Center, which offered a panoramic view of the campus itself.  Berks President Kathy Brown welcomed all attendees as we sipped our drinks (two complimentary with registration) and gave shout-outs to all former Berks presidents (a number of whom were present) and current officers, a number of whom are finishing out terms this year. Mary Maples Dunn also appeared in a streaming video loop on JumboTron talking about her experience with the Berks and women’s history.

Friday was all about the sessions, as attendees scattered across campus to sample the variety of panels on women’s history.  I did hear some grumblings from premodern historians that the conference was a little light on offerings relevant to those studying medieval history.  I know that conference organizers in the past (including Historiann herself) have gone out of their way to encourage panels on premodern history, so my question is this: are conferences like the Berks light on premodern offerings because historians start to think that they will be so and don’t apply?  Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if we know that organizers are trying to encourage these historians’ participation? Or does something more need to happen in order to ensure it?  Discuss amongst yourselves.  (Ed. note:  See also Another Damned Medievalist’s posts on this question–her answer is that more premodern scholars need to get involved!)

Friday night featured a plenary on the sex of geopolitics (more on this below) and a wild performance of the Down and Dirty Show, a cabaret troupe from Minneapolis of drag kinging and burlesque and all kinds of gender-bending fun! I also was fortunate enough to swing an invite to the post-performance party at Berks President Kathy Brown’s campus hotel suite. I even got to chat with Historiann blogging pal Tenured Radical, who was roused out of bed just to attend.  Lots of fun was had by all present, I can assure you, so much so that we got noise complaints.  There was drinking and chatting and carousing, and maybe some burlesque spanking of certain Berks conference officers who shall remain nameless.  Who says that feminist historians don’t know how to have fun?!?

I would now like to address the one real problem I experienced at the Berks this year, though one that almost all academics will recognize is not particular to the Berks: People do not know when to shut up.  When we are told that we have 10 minutes, or 15, or however many we are told by our session chairs, it is quite simply the height of arrogance to assume that we can talk for as long as we want.  Not one among us is going to be the first to fit 20 pages into 15 minutes; it’s not possible.  And editing one’s paper as one stands behind the lectern is not a strategy that can be endorsed by this reporter. This applies to roundtables as well as traditional sessions, to discussants and panelists.  It was the rare session I attended where there was anything close to ample time for discussion and where a majority of panelists did not exceed the allotted time.  The most obvious example of this was the plenary on geopolitics, where there was no time for a comment or discussion.  At all. I also attended a really fascinating roundtable on legal history that was expressly designed to be discussion-oriented and actually included but 10 minutes of Q&A!  (Ed. note:  Claude, ADM was way ahead of you on this.  Panel and roundtable Chairs–did you lose your watches?  Were you all MIA like me?)

For many, the highlight of the Berks, at least socially, is the famed dance.  And this one was super fun!  (see the picture above)  Featuring a DJ from the Down and Dirty Show, attendees danced it out to classics (“Runaround Sue!” “The Twist!”) and more recent musical fare in the Student Union Ballroom.  (It had grown cold by Saturday so both the BBQ – which didn’t seem to include any food that had ever seen a barbecue – and the dance were moved indoors.  A big tent sat forlornly unused on the lawn.)  The dance did not actually wind down till 1:15, I am told; Classy Claude and his entourage departed around 12:30; he had a session to attend in the morning.

Sunday morning was devoted to seminars and workshops, an innovation that was carried over from the last Berks, though somewhat differently, it seems to me.  Last time the seminar themes and chairs were announced in advance and hopefuls applied directly to those chairs in order to be admitted.  This time many of the sessions seemed to have been composed by the program committee itself (sometimes by converting regular panel applications into Sunday seminars) and were sometimes a little disjointed.  Some participants also did not upload their papers to the conference website beforehand, which meant that audience members couldn’t read them.  In short, the purpose remained the same: coerce conference attendees to stay for Sunday morning.  But the method was perhaps less effective: not the same emphasis on applying to do a workshop with a big-name figure in the field and gaining her expertise.   This was certainly my experience, and that of two others who participated in two different seminars, but may not have been universal.  Other readers’ thoughts?

I’m going to sign off here, because I’ve already gone on for far too long.  All in all, it was a great time in a truly lovely setting.  The conference organizers clearly worked hard to make it that way, and they succeeded admirably.  I very much look forward not just to the next Berks (I heard rumors of Toronto in 2014) but to many beyond that, with Historiann around to participate!

Thanks so much for your faithful reporting, Claude.  I’m sorry I missed seeing you and catching up at the Berks–have a terrific summer and we’ll talk soon! 

Thanks for your kind comments and e-mails–our family emergency has been resolved.  I’m sure you’re wondering what on earth could keep me away from the Berkshire Conference 2011, especially considering that there won’t be another one until 2014!  Well, friends–there isn’t a lot that would keep me away from it, but there’s something I haven’t told you about Famille Historiann before that might put this into perspective: 

I am the living mother of a living child I’ll call Madeline (not her name), who, unfortunately, had a bum appendix that announced itself as acute abdominal pain at 5:45 a.m. Thursday morning.  She had an appendectomy about 12 hours later at Maine Medical Center in Portland, no rupture and no complications.  As these things go, this was a health emergency that was speedily dealt with and easily resolved–she was released Friday morning at 9 a.m., and by Friday afternoon was playing energetically outside her grandparents’ house with her cousin.  The timing was unfortunate since I had to miss the big conference, but it could have happened at a worse time and place–like during one of our wilderness backpacking trips, or when we’re not staying with family members.  Fortunately, Fratguy was here too–he was scheduled to fly back on Thursday, but he postponed his return to Colorado until today.

As many of you readers know, I haven’t disclosed my parental status previously by design, although I think some of you have guessed–the Sesame Street YouTube clips, the discussions of children’s literature, and the references to the Kid’s Place Live channel on satellite radio probably weren’t too subtle.  But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of blogs out there about parenting and not so many blogs about history and sexual politics, 1492 to the present, and it’s my professional interests and political views rather than my personal life that I wanted to blog about.  There are a lot of mothers in the world, whereas there aren’t all that many people with my particular training and expertise.  There are a lot of women who write about motherhood in the mainstream media, but not nearly so many women writing outside of that identity and/or writing on feminist issues.  Motherhood doesn’t make me special or interesting, or especially interesting.

I also didn’t want to identify myself as a mother because I think that a lot of blog conversations about mothering can become essentialist and personal in ways that work against feminist analysis.  (For examples of those kinds of conversations, in which people with a particular experience of motherhood assume I’m not a mother because I express opinions about motherhood they disagree with see here, here, and here; Dr. Crazy has written about this too.  Because all mothers everywhere transhistorically are identical, right?)  As I’ve written here before, I don’t think motherhood is authorizing beyond one’s personal experience, because people’s experiences of parenthood are different because children and adults are different.  What worked for your family might not work for mine, and vice-versa, and most children end up okay no matter what.  (And besides–in my case, N=1, and unlike Dr. Laura Schlessinger, I don’t think my particular experience of parenting one child makes me an expert.)

There’s also the question of writing in ways that people might find interesting and stimulating.  I love Madeline–and those of you with children love your children, too, but do we really need to read and write about that here?  I also think children should be permitted to make their own mistakes about creating online identities when the time comes.  Blogging about my child just seemed too invasive of her privacy, so I created an online persona who left her position as a mother or a non-mother ambiguous.  Additionally, when I started my blog Madeline was very small, and I was wary (as a not-really-pseudonymous blogger) about how that kind of information might be used by others who didn’t mean us well.  Now that she’s reached the age of reason I’m less concerned about her safety, but I still don’t relish the ways in which this kind of information can be used to frighten and/or enrage me.

This cowgirl has said her piece.  Let’s pretend this conversation never happened.

For those of you who will be joining us at the Berks:  watch for the cowgirl boots, and say “hi” if you feel like it!  (If I’ve pi$$ed you off, you can just ignore me.)  Don’t forget about our meetup tomorrow afternoon after the last sessions ends, 5:30-6:30 at the Grad Lounge of the Lincoln Campus Center.  Apparently, TR will also be kicking it in cowgirl boots, but hers are a more city-appropriate black.  She went to grad school and lived in NYC for a spell.  My boots are the color of the high plains dust I rode in with.

I once gave a conferece paper titled “Fields of Screams,” after an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon on an old episode of The Simpsons.  It was about borderlands warfare and masculinity, and although I discarded the specific argument in that paper it helped me work out some ideas about space and gender.  Recently, I’ve been having fun shocking people with Judith Bennett’s “lesbian-like” interpretive frame for understanding eighteenth-century Ursulines.  I’m not sure where this idea is going, but it’s fascinating to see some people react so strongly and so negatively to the use of the word “lesbian” to talk about the eighteenth century!  (Bennett’s lesbian-like women is in fact a very nuanced concept.  It’s not so much about a particular sexuality but more a critique of the heterocentricity of women’s history, and an argument about creating space for imagining women-centered women’s communities in the distant past.  Still, many people can’t get beyond their very fixed notions of what “lesbian” means.)

One of the things that I think was so desctructive of the controvery surrouding Michael Bellesiles’s book Arming America a decade ago is that it fed the popular notion that professional historians dig up allegedly objective facts and simply report them.  We do that–but anyone who has worked in an archive and thought for about 4 seconds about hir sources knows that there’s no such thing as an “objective fact.”  And furthermore, the art of history is in the assembly and interpretation of problematic individual facts.  I think it’s perfectly fine for historians to be wrong, and that it’s not evidence of professional misconduct to make an argument that the consensus of our peers judges incorrect. 

I like Bennett’s idea of experimenting with interpretations of history in “playful, wise, and careful ways.”  Why shouldn’t we?  What do the rest of you think?

It’s brave of her to throw a bucket of cold water in the face of graduating Seniors by telling them this:

As we sit here looking at this magnificent blue-robed class, we have to admit something that’s sad but true: men run the world. Of 190 heads of 2 state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women; numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women.

I recognize that this is a vast improvement from generations in the past. When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her. But what is so sad—it doesn’t just make me feel old, it makes me truly sad—is that it’s very clear that my generation is not going to change this problem. Women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table.

She’s got a solid analysis of the reasons for this stasis, and some good advice for ambitious women, which if I summarize here will sound like a bunch of commencement address cliches but are actually pretty smart. I wish when she pointed out the negative correlation between success and likability for women that she had said, “F^ck likeability. You think Mark Zuckerberg gives a $hit about likeability?” Instead, she implicitly feeds the notion that likeability is something we need to worry about. I think telling women they’re not “likeable,” or that people find them “difficult personalities,” is a way to knock them off their game and get them to worry about trivial stuff they can’t control instead of worrying about decisive stuff they can at least partially control. (Kind of like this, h/t reader KV for the link.)

Heh. A few years ago at the Berks conference, we on the program committee got some negative feedback from some younger women that our plenary on the state of women in the historical profession was too much of a buzzkill. (They didn’t want to hear about just how bad it is, and how immoveable the percentages of women in tenured and tenure-track positions really is.) Back to the Sandberg speech–I thought this advice was pretty shrewd, too, about the “choice” to prioritize family over professional success:

But until that day, do everything you can to make sure that when that day comes, you even have a choice to make. Because what I have seen most clearly in my 20 years in the workforce is this: Women almost never make one decision to leave the workforce. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day. Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.

These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back. The problem is, often they don’t even realize it. Everyone I know who has voluntarily left a child at home and come back to the workforce—and let’s face it, it’s not an option for most people. But for people in this audience, many of you are going to have this choice. Everyone who makes that choice will tell you the exact same thing: You’re only going to do it if your job is compelling.

If several years ago you stopped challenging yourself, you’re going to be bored. If you work for some guy who you used to sit next to, and really, he should be working for you, you’re going to feel undervalued, and you won’t come back. So, my heartfelt message to all of you is, and start thinking about this now, do not leave before you leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even have a decision to make.

What do you think? Do you think she gets it just about right–that success is for closers, with some acknowledgement of the powerful institutional forces arrayed against the success of even very privileged women like the Barnard class of 2011? Or do you think she’s not acknowledging these powerful forces enough?

Come and git us!

Howdy, friends!  It’s just a month until the Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women will convene at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on June 9-12.  (See the program here–it explains it all.)  I can’t wait!

Tenured Radical, Clio Bluestocking, Another Damned Medievalist, Janice Liedl, Knitting Clio, and I have found a good time for a blogger (and blog reader) meetup, after the sessions end on Friday afternoon, and before the dining hall closes at (the improbably early hour of) 7 p.m.  So, we’ll be hanging out in the Grad Lounge of the Lincoln Campus Center from 5:30 to 6:30–come join us and enjoy the beverage of your choice!  If you consult the campus map on page 27 of the program, you’ll see that the Lincoln Campus Center is also the conference hotel, and is right across the street from Worcester Dining, where you can find your dinner after the meetup.

I’d like to buy you all a drinkie–but this time we’ll all go dutch.  Remember, our blogs are labors of love and professional devotion, which is why they’re proudly ad free!

Public History Tour 2010!

Where in the world is Historiann on this summer’s random public history tour?  Well, here’s a clue on the left–some of us dwell in possibility, wherever we go.  I had never visited before, and neither had my subset of the attendees of the Little Berks conference this year, at Mt. Holyoke College.  The Big Berks–otherwise known as the Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, will be at the University of Massachusetts next June.  (Check out that new website!)  The program committee meets tomorrow–so keep your fingers crossed if you submitted a proposal last winter.

So many interesting people are here–the elusive Clio Bluestockingshowed up, and seated herself near me at dinner last night.  (I’ve had a lot of people tell me they’re reading this blog–only compliments so far, but the conference is only half over!)  After dinner last night, Mary Beth Norton and Judith Zinsser spoke about the history of the Berkshire Conference, and the “ladies” who founded it (including the tradition of trillium-spotting and bourbon-drinking.  Unfortunately, threatening thunderstorms and hail had us looking for more indoor-oriented activities today.)  Norton noted that the official name of the organization is the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, not the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians, and she lamented that there are very few non-women’s historians who attend any more since the Big Berks conference on women’s history effectively “took over” the identity of the organization.

Is there value in an organization for women historians who are not-necessarily-women’s-historians, or is it perfectly fine that women’s history now dominates the organizational identity of both the Big and the Little Berks?  (One audience member, Leisa Meyer of the College of William and Mary, spoke of how “embattled” women’s history has been for the past decade or so, ever since it stopped being the next latest thing, and spoke up on behalf of an organization that is explicitly tied to women’s history rather than to women historians.)  I can see merit in both points of view.  On the one hand, we’re a small organization, so who are we to turn away a potential member?  On the other hand, the Big Berks has been a Big Success, so what’s wrong with a haven for women’s historians?  I don’t see too many other organizations stepping up to either plate.  In fact, I see none whatsoever, with the exception 0f the American Historical Association’s standing Committee on Women Historians.

What do you think?

Catch you next week!  Don’t forget:  proposals for panels, workshops, and single papers for the 2011 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women are due March 19!  So spend whatever time you’d otherwise be spending at Historiann.com this week putting together a proposal for the Berks instead.

We’ll have to do a massive femblogger meetup there.  The conference will be in Amherst at the University of Massachusetss, June 9-12–the Pioneer Valley is lovely in the late spring, friends!  And remember:  this comet only comes around every 3 years, so if you miss this one, you’ll regret it for sure.

Once again, Historiann’s better-traveled and more in-the-loop friend Classy Claude is at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, and has volunteered to report back what he’s seen and heard.  Here, he updates us on the Doug Manchester/Hyatt boycott, a prominent American women’s history panel, and who puts on the best free reception.  Try not to hate him because he’s in San Diego–hate him because he’s beautiful, and employed!  

Greetings from sunny San Diego!  My view of San Diego Bay from the 17^th floor of the Hilton gives some idea of just how lovely and temperate it is here right now (see the photo on the right, by Claude himself.)  And the Hilton conveniently provides running maps to cover various distances along the promenade.  Historiann, you would love it!  

 I have no actual idea of the numbers at this year’s AHA, but I can’t help but think that it’s down from recent years.  Not one of the panels I have attended so far, for instance, has had its full component of scheduled speakers. Reasons for these absences are manifold. First, the abysmal job market: if there are fewer interviewers and interviewees (the main purpose here for most), then fewer attendees.  Second, getting to San Diego is expensive for most North Americans.  Combine that with the fact that many colleges and universities have slashed travel budgets and it becomes prohibitively expensive for many.  Third, there are the Midwestern storms that certainly have delayed some people’s arrival and may well have stranded them altogether.  And fourth, the gay and labor boycott of the Manchester Grand Hyatt (led by UNITE HERE and Equality California, but with many other organizational supporters) seems to have led some gay would-be attendees to cancel as well.  

As many of Historiann’s readers know, before the 2009 meeting it came to the attention of some AHA members that the owner of the Hyatt, Doug Manchester, had given about 100K to the successful Proposition 8 campaign (to ban same-sex marriage in California).  Rather than pull out of the contract with Manchester, which would have cost the AHA about 800K and only benefited him financially, the attendees at 2009’s business meeting voted instead to hold a themed mini-conference on the history of same-sex marriage, couplehood, and queer history generally.  The mini-conference would be embedded within the AHA and most of its sessions would be held at the Hyatt itself as a form of protest. There are sixteen sessions affiliated with this mini-conference and a number of others sponsored by the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, the AHA’s queer historians’ affiliate.  

The sticky part is this: the consumer boycott of the Hyatt remains.  And this puts queer historians and their allies in a tricky position.  The AHA is actually paying the Hyatt very little money upfront.  The meeting rooms are gratis and the Hyatt will profit (surely is profiting) primarily from attendees staying with them and patronizing the restaurants and businesses in their lobbies.  So many have chosen to stay at the other conference hotels, primarily the Hilton or Marriott, or another offsite hotel. But many other attendees (at least those I’ve spoken with) had no idea about the consumer boycott, about Manchester’s role in Prop 8, or indeed that the preponderance of panels on gender and sexuality (seriously: it must be the most coverage of sexuality and queer issues ever at an AHA) had anything to do with Manchester.  In other words, the AHA has not necessarily done the best job of publicizing all of what’s occurred and advising members of what their hotel options might be if they wanted to honor the consumer boycott.  And there is also an actual protest outside the Hyatt itself.  It appears only to be in the front (no sign at the back harbor entrances) and it is small.  Yesterday, for instance, I saw about four or five protesters handing out leaflets.  But today at 2:00 a larger demonstration is planned.   I’ll provide some details tomorrow…  

As for the conference itself: I have now been to a few mini-conference panels and attendance is sizable and discussion lively.  While these panels were to be made open to the public (no AHA badge necessary) it seems to be largely historians, especially as many local queer people seem committed to the boycott of the hotel and won’t enter it.  (There is also a security detail assigned to each mini-conference session. Those gays–dangerous!!) First session of the conference yesterday was a panel on “misbehaving women” in the nineteenth century, a nod to AHA President Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous aphorism about well-behaved women seldom making history.  Gail Bederman, Patricia Cline Cohen, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz gave papers on Frances Wright, Mary Gove Nichols, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, respectively.  As one attendee noted, “it was like the early Berks” in its focus on biography, but with the advantage of a couple decades worth of stellar scholarship on gender and sexuality to make our understanding of these three women’s lives that much more contextualized.  I also attended a SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic)/McNeil Center reception last night at a restaurant on the harbor within walking distance of all the hotels.  Free beer and wine and a great selection of appetizers.  I like those early Americanists!  

Off to my own panel now but will keep my eye out for more to report on tomorrow, including the anti-Manchester protest.

Thanks for checking in Claude, and we’ll look forward to tomorrow’s report.  Remember everyone–keep smiling!

You’ve been waiting for it all year long–and it’s here!  The next Berkshire Conference on the History of Women will be at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst June 9-12, 2011.  The call for papers and all of the details can be found here, and the deadline for proposals is March 1, 2010.  (That’s less than five months from now, girls and boys, so put your thinking caps on!  Tip of the thinking cap to Tenured Radical, who alerted me to this announcement.)

The conference theme for 2011 is “Generations:  Exploring Race, Sexuality, and Labor Across Time and Space.”  From the CFP: 

2011 marks the 15th Berkshire Conference on Women’s History and the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which was first celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland and is now honored by more than sixty countries around the globe. The choice of “Generations” reflects this transnational intellectual, political, and organizational heritage as well as a desire to explore related questions such as: 

• How have women’s generative experiences – from production and reproduction to creativity and alliance building – varied across time and space? How have these been appropriated and represented by contemporaries and scholars alike?
• What are the politics of “generation”? Who is encouraged? Who is condemned or discouraged? How has this changed over time?
• Is a global perspective compatible with generational (in the genealogical sense) approaches to the past that tend to reinscribe national/regional/racial boundaries?
• What challenges do historians of women, gender, and sexuality face as these fields and their practitioners mature?

To engender further, open-ended engagement with these and other issues, the 2011 conference will include workshops dedicated to discussing precirculated papers on questions and problems (epistemological, methodological, substantive) provoked by the notion of “Generations.”

The conference organizers have changed the organizational structure for the conference substantially, so please read the further instructions carefully:  “To encourage transnational discussions, panels will be principally organized along thematic rather than national lines and therefore proposals will be vetted by a transnational group of scholars with expertise in a particular thematic, rather than geographic, field.”  So, instead of dividing the work up according to nationality and geography, with a U.S. and Canadian chair, a European chair, and a Global/transnational chair, proposals should be sent to one of the following thematic subcommittees:

Beauty and the Body, Stephanie Camp

Migrations: Race, Gender and Activism, Annelise Orleck

Economies, Labors, and Consumption, Tracey Deutsch

War, Violence, and Terror, Madhavi Kale

Youth and Aging, Jennifer Spear

Race in Global Perspective, Marilyn Lake

Health and Medicine, Julie Livingston

Sexuality, Kathy Brown (she’s the Berks president for 2009-2011, and the principal organizer of this conference)

Religion: Belief, Practice, Communities, Madhavi Kale

Politics and the State, Margot Canaday

Now, that’s an all-star lineup, friends.  This new scheme should change the way you assemble your panel and explain your work in your proposals–keep in mind that you’ll need to emphasize themes and not national or regional histories, and that your application will be read by a number of scholars unfamiliar with the region or national history you work within.  (P.S.  I’m talking to you, modern U.S. historians, for the most part!)  Start thinking and e-mailing your colleagues now–the website for applications will be open as of November 1, and I’ll post a reminder and a link as soon as it goes live next month.