Iris Berger
In recent years, the University's History Department has developed a unique strength in women's history. Sucheta Mazumdar, among the newest members of the department, is a Chinese historian whose scholarly interests cover women throughout Asian and Asian women in the United States. Co-editor of Making Waves: Writings on Asian Women in America (in press), she held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College during 1986-87. June Hahner has written widely on women in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Brazil. Interested especially in the suffrage movement and in the lives of working class women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she is the author of Women in Latin America and of two books published in Brazil. Ben Barker-Benfield, whose earlier work focused on medical attitudes toward women in nineteenth century America, is currently engaged in a study of Mary Wollstonecraft designed to establish her place as a major European social and political theorist. He is also near the completion of a co-edited two volume work entitled Portraits of American Women. An interest in working class women in twentieth century South Africa has shaped the current work of Iris Berger, who has also written on the social and political role of American women's religious organizations. Her co-edited book, Women and Class in Africa, appeared in paperback edition this spring. Professors Hahner and Berger both received grants last year from the Gender Roles Program of the Rockefeller Foundation.
In addition to their scholarly research, members of the department are engaged in various projects to enrich the curriculum through greater attention to gender and race. Professor Mazumdar has received a grant from SUNYA's Affirmative Action Office to facilitate the integration of minority experience into American history courses, while Professor Berger, working with a project supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, is completing a guide to integrating women into courses in African history.
Beyond its varied selection of undergraduate courses on women, the department is in the planning stages for a more comprehensive program in comparative women's history. As part of a proposed Ph.D. program, women's history would be a major field that would include courses and seminars on Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin, America and the United States as well as work in the theory and methodology of the field. This program may also draw on faculty members in other departments who do research on women's history. For example, Chris Bose of the Sociology Department is studying U.S. women's work in 1900 and Edna Acosta-Belen of the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies has focused on Puerto Rican women and their contributions to cultural and socio-historical processes.