G.J. Barker-Benfield
An innovative new Ph.D. program in history makes gender an integral part of the study of the past. The program centers around two concentrations, States and Society, and on how the two are related. Both concentrations, the former focusing on public policy and international history, and the latter on work, gender and culture, offer students the possibility of pursuing courses and research projects on women and gender.
Because faculty expertise in the history of gender is unusually international in scope, the program also provides a unique opportunity to explore the histories of women and men in a wide range of cultures and societies in Africa, Europe and the Americans, and to study gender comparatively in diverse parts of the world. The following historians of women and gender will participate in this uniquely organized new program.
Transatlantic Perspectives
G.J. Barker-Benfield who holds a joint appointment in History and Women's Studies, has written on the histories of women and men in three centuries of United States and British history. His books include The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America and The Culture of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Currently he is exploring nineteenth-century aspects of the history of gender in America from a transatlantic perspective and he will offer seminars on these issues as well as on those examined in his most recent book.
Africa and Latin America
Iris Berger, jointly appointed in History, Africana Studies and Women's Studies, does work on the history of women in Africa, with particular interests in South and East Africa. Although she has written widely on precolonial women's history, her most recent book, Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980, examines work, politics and community in the twentieth century. Both this book and her coedited volume, Women and Class in Africa reflect her concern with the theoretical aspects of the relationship among race, class and gender. She is also interested in comparative women's history.
June Hahner holds joint appointments in History, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women's Studies She is one of the world's leading scholars of the history of women and feminism in Brazil, having published Women in Latin American History: Their Lives and Views and Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850-1940. Her related research focus in class, represented by another of her many books, Povery and Politics in Brazil, 1870-1920. Professor's Hahner's work bridges all of the concentrations in the new program.
African American Women
Lillian S. Williams, an historian with an appointment in Women's Studies, will be working closely with history Ph.D. students. Specializing in African American and women's history, she is also concerned with historical methodology. She is an Associate Editor of the sixteen-volume series Black Women in United States History and consulting editor of a major microfilming project on the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Her book-length manuscript on Buffalo, New York's African American community is near completion.
In addition to specialists on women and gender, other members of the department are interested in working with Ph.D. students on gender-related topics: Gerald Zahavi (Workers, Managers and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoe Workers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson) on women and work, oral history and quantative methods; Robert Frost (Mechanical Dreams: Technology, Culture and Gender in Interwar France) on women and technology and European women; and Ann Withington (Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue in the Formation of American Republics) on women and culture in the United States.