A NOTE FROM THE CHAIR
Do we have a rich newsletter for you! Our faculty have been incredibly productive this year. (Must be catching up up after the pandemic.) Please enjoy these updates from History faculty. You'll find reading suggestions from new faculty publications, too.
— Cathryn Carson, Department Chair
FACULTY UPDATES
MARGARET LAVINIA ANDERSON has recently taken a step away from her work in the field of history and is currently working as a script doctor for manuscriptsfor a press, a journal, and two of her friends.
THOMAS A. BRADY, JR. received the Anne Lake Prescott Prize for Mentorship at the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference on October 27, 2023 via Zoom. His PhD student, Amy Leonard, received it in person on his behalf since he was not able to attend. He was celebrated by Leonard and a number of his other graduate students from UC Berkeley who were able to attend the event.
MARGARET CHOWNING published her book Catholic Women and Mexican Politics in early 2023. Her book won the 2023 Howard Cline Prize for Best Book in Mexican History.
BRIAN DELAY spent much of the past year and a half working as an expert witness in Second Amendment civil court cases. The Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision instructed lower courts to stop taking public safety into consideration when assessing the constitutionality of firearms laws. Instead, they were to decide those cases based solely on a law's relationship to history, text, and tradition. Gun Rights groups have responded with an unprecedented wave of challenges to firearms regulations around the country, and states have looked to the small handful of academic historians working on eighteenth and nineteenth century firearms history to help them defend those laws. Since then, DeLay has been involved in more than two dozen cases in eight states and the District of Columbia. In August 2023, he was part of a group of professors of history and law who submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in matter of U.S. v. Rahimi, another major Second Amendment case. "The Second Amendment work has been fascinating and eye-opening, but also a detour from finishing a book called Aim at Empire, about the arms trade in the age of revolutions," states DeLay. A preview of that book can be found in an article titled "The Arms Trade & American Revolutions," which appeared in the American Historical Review in September 2023.
DZOVINAR DERDERIAN organized the “Translation and Armenian Modes of Communication: Bridging Times and Spaces” conference for UC Berkeley’s Armenian Studies Program which took place on April 15, 2023. Away from UC Berkeley, Derderian attended the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in Québec, Canada from November 2-5, 2023. There she gave a roundtable presentation titled Armenians, Kurds, and the Politics of Ottoman Historiography. Currently, Derderian is awaiting the publication of her forthcoming article, “Orders and Disorders of Marriage, Church, and Empire in Mid-Nineteenth- Century Ottoman Armenia,” which is set to appear in the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
SANDRA EDER was appointed Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS) at UC Berkeley in September 2023. Outside of her work on campus, Eder participated in the Geschlecht, Kjønn, Sex, Gender: Translation, Adaption und Wissenszirkulation in de Medizin des 20. Jahrhunderts which took place at the Institute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité - University Medicine Berlin on November 20, 2023. During her time there she delivered a talk about her book How the Clinic Made Gender: The History of a Transformative Idea.
JOHN EFRON has been on sabbatical for the 2023-2024 academic year to work on two books — a completed book manuscript titled All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat and a book still currently in revision titled A History of Modern Jews.
PUCK ENGMAN published his article “What Right to Property When Rebellion Is Justified? Revolution in Shanghai” in Justice After Moa: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China which was published in August 2023.
ERICH S. GRUEN wrote multiple articles in 2023 including “Displaced in Diaspora? Jewish Communities in the Greco-Roman World” for Diaspora and Literary Studies (July 2023), "Antisemitism in the Pagan World” for Antisemitic Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (October 2023) and "Nationhood: Was There Such a Thing in Antiquity?” for The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Volume 1: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée (October 2023). Alongside his writing, Gruen participated in multiple lectures and conferences including "Greek Myth and the Jews" a remote lecture at Rockford University (March 2023), "The Sibyl, Cassandra, and Rome" a remote conference held in Naples, Italy (June 2023) and "Were the Ancient Greeks Responsible for Antisemitism?" a lecture held at Princeton University (October 2023). This year Gruen is awaiting the publication of his book Scriptural Tales Retold which will be published through Bloomsbury Publishing.
DAVID HENKIN wrote “Three Cheers for Partisanship: Politics is a team sport, and that's okay.” for Atlantic Magazine (online) in September 2023. In 2023, he also partook in multiple interviews including, “David M. Henkin | On his book The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are” for Rorotoko (May 2023); “Why Do We Have a Seven- Day Week” for the BBC’s The Forum (June 2023); and “Marking Time” for PBS North Carolina’s The Articulate Hour (June 2023). Throughout the year, Henkin was also invited to give talks at Brown University, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Southern Methodist University, and Rikkyo University (Tokyo). Currently, he is working on finishing a cultural history of baseball for Oxford University Press, which should be published in 2025.
REBECCA HERMAN’s year was bookmarked by the success of her book Cooperating with the Colossus. In April 2023, she presented her book at the Organization of American Historians conference in LA as part of a panel featuring new books that feature both Panama and the United States. Throughout 2023, Herman also gave many talks about her book at various universities including the University of Washington, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, UC Berkeley (via the Social Science Matrix and Center for Latin American Studies), and as part of a series co-organized by Sciences Po and Leiden University. She also was interviewed about her book on two podcasts including Lawfare Podcast in November 2022 and New Books Network in March 2023.
Cooperating with the Colossus also won the 2023 Tonous & Warda Johns Family Book Award (awarded to "the outstanding monograph or edited volume in the history of U.S. foreign relations, immigration history, or military history") from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association as well as Honorable Mention for the 2023 Pacific Coast Branch Award (given to "the outstanding first monograph on any historical subject) from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. It was also named a "Best Book of 2023" by Foreign Affairs and received Honorable Mention for the Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.
Outside of promoting her book, Herman spent much of 2023 contributing to various publications and academic groups. In June 2023, she became a member of the inaugural cohort of scholars who participated in The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University's Institute for Society and the Environment. While at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations meeting in Alexandria, VA in June 2023, she organized a roundtable on Transnational Environmental Activism and presented the work featured in her Environmental History Article. During her time at the meeting of the Humanities and Social Sciences section of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which met in Lisbon in June 2023, she organized and participated in a panel on the 1980s in Antarctic history. Most recently, at the American Historical Association, Conference on Latin American History meeting in San Francisco in January 2024, she contributed to a roundtable on Social and Environmental Histories of Waste in Latin America and chaired two other panels.
Herman also made a couple of radio appearances in 2023, apprearing on the American Historical Association's History in Focus podcast to discuss her contribution to the Forum on International and Transnational History and on Mendocino Public Radio's KZYX Public Affairs, to discuss Argentine history.
Alongside her public appearances, Herman published an essay titled "Latin America and the Guts of Global History" in the American Historical Review in March 2023 as part of a Forum on International and Transnational History. An edited volume which she had previously contributed to which was orginally published in Portuguese in Brazil, was also translated and published in English under the title The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States via Lexington Books.
Most recently, in January 2024 an article titled "Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina" was published in the journal, Environmental History. This is the first publication to result from the research Herman has been doing on her new book project which focuses on Antarctica in the 1970s and 80s. Notably, this same book project allowed Herman to return to Buenos Aires in 2023 for further work in military and civilian archives documenting the Argentine military dictatorship's efforts to populate one of its bases on the Antarctic peninsula with a settlement of families.
Currently, Herman is completing her time as a 2023-2024 Social Science Matrix Faculty Fellow and awaiting the publication of an afterword she wrote for a forthcoming volume on Antarctica and Colonialism, which will be published in 2024.
HIDETAKA HIROTA was a guest lecturer at the Irish American Heritage Museum (online) on September 27, 2023. There he gave a lecture titled “Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth- Century Origins of American Immigration Policy.” On November 13, 2023, Hirota appeared in Berkeley Voices to discuss the immigrant labor used for railroad construction in the nineteenth-century United States. In December of 2023, he servered as a guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 13, Number 4, which explored the United States' engagements with Asia and the Pacific during the Civil War Era in the nineteenth century. Hirota's article “Transpacific Connections in the Civil War Era,” can be found within the issue.
So far in 2024, Hirota has attended the American Historical Association conference in San Francisco on January 6th; appeared in Berkeley Voices again to discuss the origins of immigration law in the United States on January 8th; and appeared in Muster: How the Past Informs the Present to discuss the special issue on Pacific Connections in the Civil War Era in the Journal of the Civil War Era. Most recently, in January 2024 he was elected Vice President/President Elect of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the leading scholarly organization for historians of US immigration. After serving as vice president for three years, he will start his three-year term as president in 2027.
DAVID A. HOLLINGER served as a session panelist at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the United States Intellectual History Association, and was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of Phi Alpha Theta of Southern California. Alongside his in person appearances, he did a number of podcast and video interviews related to his most recent book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. Additionally, Hollinger published an essay-review titled “The Religious Tide’s Withdrawing Roar: Heard on American Shores” in the Reviews in American History in September 2023. In 2023, he also continued his service on two committees of the American Philosophical Society and two committees of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and completed two years of service as President of the UC Berkeley Emeriti Association.
MARTIN JAY published three books in 2023, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure; La razon despues de su eclipse, Sobre la Teoría Crítica tardía which was translated by Fernando Huesca; and Utopía y Dialéctica: Ensayos sobre Herbert Marcuse which was translated by Leandro Sánchez Marín and Sebastian David Giraldo. In addition to his book publications Jay published a number of articles including, “Bill Barr and ‘The Unitary Executive Theory’,” Salmagundi (Summer 2023); "The Idiosyncrasies of Artists and the Art of Politics,” Dispatches, Volume 4 (June, 2023); “The Aesthetic Alibi and the Protection of Black Art,” Salmagundi (Fall, 2023-Winter, 2024); “Intersecting with PB,” Thesis Eleven, Volume 179, Issue 1 (2023); “Introduction to ‘Truth and Politics’,” On Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Proposals for an Exhibition, curated by Gavin Delahunty (London: Richard Saltoun Gallery, 2023); a Japanese translation of "Fused Horizons? Downcast Eyes in Japan," in Vision and Interculturality, edited by Takashi Kakuni and Daisuke Kamai; Afterword to Thinking of the Medieval: Mid-Century Intellectuals and the Middle Ages, edited by R.D. Perry and Benjamin A. Saltzman (2023); Foreword to Robin Maialeh, Critical Theory and Economics: Philosophical Notes on Contemporary Inequality (2023).
Proving to be quite indemand, Jay also did quite a few interviews including, “Martin Jay İle Söyleşi: Frankfurt Okulu, Postmodernizm ve Angajman,” Ayrinti Dirgi (Ankara) on March 1, 2023; “Fifty Years after Martin Jay’s Dialectical Imagination” for The New Book Network on July 24, 2023; “Martin Jay and the Fate of Radical Ideas” for the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 11, 2023; “Martin Jay, Immanent Critiques” for The New Book Network on November 15, 2023; “Cem anos do Instituto de Pequisa Social. Entrevista com Martin Jay,” for Cadernos de Filosofia Alemã (São Paulo); “Cem anos de Escola de Frankfurt: Uma conversa com Martin Jay,” for Tempo Social, Revista de Sociologia da USP (São Paulo); “100 Jahre Einsamkeit? Grenzen und Perspektiven der Kritischen Theorie—Interview mit Martin Jay,” Diskus (Frankfurt) on January 16, 2024; and “The Centennial of the Frankfurt School and the New Era of Critical Theory – An Interview with Martin Jay” (in Chinese) for The Ming Pao Daily News (Hong Kong) on January 17, 2024.
Outside of his published work, Jay spent the year attending various conferences including, "1968 in and Expanded Field: The Frankfurt School and the Uneven Course of History," at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico City in May 2023; "Can History Judge? Can History Absolve?" at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in Mexico City in 2023; "The History of the Frankfurt School in Expanded Fields," conferences on the centenary of the Institute of Social Research at the Universidad Central de Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador (via zoom) in July 2023; University of Frankfurt, Germany in September 2023; Harvard University in October 2023; Wuhan University, China (via zoom) in October 2023; the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (via zoom) in October, 2023; and he gave a response to a panel at the Jewish Studies Association in San Francisco in December 2023.
Currently, he is working on his book Magical Nominalism: The Discourse of the Event, Aesthetic Re-enchantment and the Photograph which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024.
ETHAN KATZ appeared on the Jewish Currents podcast hosted by Peter Beinart, alongside Dylan Saba, staff attorney at Palestine Legal, in January of 2023. The trio discussed the nine student groups at UC Berkeley, who in 2022 declared that they would not host Zionist speakers, and the subsequent investigation by the U.S. Department of Education on whether the university is a hostile environment for Jewish students. Additionally, as a 2022-2023 Matrix Faculty Fellow, Katz convened a symposium with an international group of scholars on "Jews and Other Groups Who Resisted the Nazis — Means, Motivations and Limitations” in April 2023. Notably, Katz also gave multiple endowed lectures, in particular he gave one in late November 2023 at Brown University, titled "Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? New Perspectives on a Controversial Subject." The talk received considerable attention and led to Katz being invited to reprise it before other audiences on a number of campuses throughout the country. Katz ended his year by presenting his current research at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference in San Francisco in December 2023.
Alongside his public appearances, in October 2023 Katz served as a co-editor and contributing author for When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash, which was published as both an annual of the journal for the Jewish Law Association Studies and as a book. He also wrote “Dusting Off the Before-Lives of Resistance,” for a French Jewish Studies Forum in the Jewish Quarterly Review journal. Katz also had the opportunity to workshop drafts of five different chapters from his current monograph, Midnight in Algiers: Jews, the French Empire, and the Unholy Alliance That Helped the Allies Win World War II, at three different symposiums he convened on the History of Resistance in World War II, which took place at UC Berkeley, the Vanderbilt History Seminar, and at a History seminar at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
MARIA MAVROUDI was honored to be invited as a Faber lecturer at the Classics department at Princeton, where she gave a lecture titled "The medieval transmission of ancient knowledge in colonial and post-colonial narratives: moving beyond them with help from the Greek and Arabic Grammarians."
During 2023, she also published four articles on a wide variety of topics, including “Byzantine Translations from Arabic into Greek: Old and New Historiography in Confluence and in Conflict” for the Journal of Late Antique, Islamic, and Byzantine Studies, Volume 2, Issues 1–2. Her second article, a longer article on the transmission of botanical knowledge, titled “Arabic Terms in Byzantine Materia Medica: Oral and Textual Transmission” was published both , both orally and in writing in Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean: Transmission and Circulation of Pharmacological Knowledge and was edited by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Dionysios Stathakopoulos. A third article appeared in a volume dedicated to the distinguished scholar of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy Sarah Stroumsa: “Historiographical Debates and Modern Political Considerations In Writing A Cultural History of the Holy Land: A Byzantinist’s Perspective,” in Religious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond Volume I: Essays in Honor of Sarah Stroumsa, edited Sabine Schmidtke and Omer Michaelis. The fourth article is titled “Subaltern Byzantinism”, which appeared in Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Toward a Critical Historiography which was edited by Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova. The article discusses the contemporary use of Byzantine-style art to broadcast progressive political messages and focuses, among other examples, on icons and frescoes by Bay Area painter Mark Doox for two San Francisco Churches — the St. Gregory of Nysa Episcopal Church and the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church.
In June 2023, Mavroudi presented a paper at the Second Arabo-Greek Workshop, held at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The paper was an overview of the Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek and included excerpts from her recently published article on this topic. During the same month, she presented a second paper at the workshop New Perspectives on Manuscript Bologna, 3632 held inside the old library of the University of Bologna. Its holdings include one of the most important manuscripts for the transmission of the Greek magical, divinatory, and scientific tradition, which was copied in the fifteenth century in Constantinople. There Mavroudi discussed the texts from it that pertain to dream interpretation. More than twenty-five years ago, she had worked on these texts for her doctoral dissertation out of a black- and-white microfilm. At the time, this was one of more than thirty Greek and Arabic manuscripts with which she had worked with. Mavroudi states, “It was a thrill to see the Bologna manuscript for the first time and concentrate exclusively on its contents, the personality of its scribe, and the particularities of the texts on dream interpretation that it contains.”
MASSIMO MAZZOTTI published his new book Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity through The University of Chicago Press in May 2023.
MAUREEN C. MILLER’s research essay “Abbot Balsamon’s Book: The Origins of Administrative Registers at Cava Dei Tirreni” was honored in January 2023 with the Nelson J. Minnich Prize for the best article published by the Catholic Historical Review in 2022. Miller also notably completed her year as President of the Medieval Academy of America on February 25, 2023 by giving her presidential address in Washington, DC. The address — "Reframing the 'Documentary Revolution' in Medieval Italy" — highlighted the influence of her UC Berkeley students on her research. In July 2023, her address was published as the lead article in the issue of the Academy's Journal, Speculum, Volume 98, Number 3. Recently, she has given numerous lectures at institutions such as the Cambridge University Mediaeval History Seminar, the History Department at Williams College, and the World History Seminar of the Chinese University in Hong Kong.
DYLAN PENNINGROTH participated in a number of interviews for various publications including "The Forgotten Years of the Civil Rights Movement," with Kate Masur and Jeffrey Rosen for the National Constitution Center (October 5, 2023); “Before The Movement The Hidden and Vibrant History of Black Civil Rights” for KQED’s Forum (October 30, 2023); "Lessons from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Fight to Mobilize the Black Church" for TIME (January 13, 2024); and most recently “Dylan Penningroth: The Hidden History Of Black Civil Rights” with Judge LaDoris Cordell for the Commonwealth Club of California (February 22, 2024).
Alongside his various interviews, Penningroth also published his article for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review titled “Race in Contract Law” in 2022 and his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights in September 2023. Outside of his work for various publications, Penningroth attended the Plenary Address for the American Society for Legal History annual meeting in Philadelphia on October 27, 2023 and joined the History Historians Council on the Constitution at Brennan Center for Justice in 2023.
BERNADETTE PÉREZ is currently on sabbatical and living in Los Angeles while she works on her book manuscript, The Violence of American Sugar, at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. During her time away from campus she has also been workshopping a chapter of her book manuscript titled “The Shortcomings of Nature” at a consortium conference at Stanford University (April 2023); participating in a roundtable discussion on Sarah McNamara's book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, at the Labor and Working-Class History Conference (May 2023); presenting her research at the Huntington Library's Long-Term Fellows Symposium (October 2023); and participating in a panel at the Western History Conference on Policing Indigenous and Mexican Lives and Labor in the Borderlands (October 2023). Notably, in 2023 Pérez was also awarded the 2023-2024 Dana & David Dornslife Long-Term Fellowship from The Huntington Library.
ELENA SCHNEIDER returned to teaching full-time in 2023 after parental leave following the birth of her son. She also took her first research trip to visit archives in Spain since COVID-19, with her one year old in tow. “It turns out he's not a great research assistant, though he has other charms,” states Schneider. Her research in Madrid advanced her current book project on Afro- Cuban returnees to West Africa during the waning days of the slave trade. She is currently tracing the stories of several hundred men, women, and children — many of them survivors of the Middle Passage — who attained their freedom in Cuba and managed to return to their wartorn homelands in Yoruba territory (present-day Nigeria) during their lifetimes. Alongside her return to teaching and her travels, Schneider wrote an article titled “Afterword: Looking Backwards in Time from the Eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic World,” which appeared in the Colonial Latin American Review, Volume 32, Number 1 in March 2023.
STACY VAN VLEET had her article “Medical Culture and Manuscript Culture” published in Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume II: Elaborations which was edited by Matthew T. Kapstein and published on March 15, 2024. Van Vleet has also recently been awarded the 2024-2025 Townsend Fellowship by Townsend Center for the Humanities.
HANNAH ZEAVIN was awarded The Mahoney Prize for Best Article in the History of Computing and Information Technology published in 2022 from the Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS), part of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), for “THIS IS WOMENSPACE: USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983-1986,” which was published in Technology and Culture, Volume 63, Number 3 in July 2022. In 2023, Zeavin also wrote various articles including “Editors’ Introduction: Archives of Survival, Networks of Care,” special issue on media histories of care, Feminist Media Histories, co-edited with Olivia Banner (January 2023); “Beyond Diagnosis: The Hotline & State Apparatus in The Slender Thread,” special issue on “Diagnosing America,” American Literary History, Volume 35, Issue 03 (June 2023); and “The Medium Inside,” “In Focus” Special Section on “Quotidian Media Studies,” for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Volume 62, Issue 04 (Summer 2023). Alongside her academic publications, Zeavin continued writing for the public with essays in Bookforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Parapraxis. Currently she is working on two books. The first, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance, which was bought by Penguin Press in 2023 and marks her third book sold. The second, Mother Media: Technology in the American Family, is currently in its final stages before production and is set to be published by MIT Press in 2025.
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RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS
SAVARKAR AND THE MAKING OF HINDUTVA (2024) BY JANAKI BAHKLE
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was an intellectual, ideologue, and an- ticolonial nationalist leader in India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, one whose anti-Muslim writings exploited India’s tensions in pursuit of Hindu majority rule. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva is the first comprehensive intellectual history of one of the most contentious politi- cal thinkers of the twentieth century.
Janaki Bakhle examines the full range of Savarkar’s voluminous writings in his native language of Marathi, from political and historical works to poetry, essays, and speeches. She reveals the complexities in the various positions he took as a champion of the beleaguered Hindu community, an anticaste pro- gressive, an erudite if polemical historian, a pioneering advocate for women’s dignity, and a patriotic poet. This critical examination of Savarkar’s thought shows that Hindutva is as much about the aesthetic experiences that have been attached to the idea of India itself as it is a militant political program that has targeted the Muslim community in pursuit of power in postcolonial India.
By bringing to light the many legends surrounding Savarkar, Bakhle shows how this figure from a provincial locality in colonial India rose to world-historical importance. Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva also un- covers the vast hagiographic literature that has kept alive the myth of Savarkar as a uniquely brave, brilliant, and learned revolutionary leader of the Hindu nation.
CATHOLIC WOMEN AND MEXICAN POLITICS 1750-1940 (2023) BY MARGARET CHOWNING
What accounts for the enduring power of the Catholic Church, which withstood widespread and sustained anticlerical opposition in Mexico? Margaret Chowning locates an answer in the untold story of how the Mexican Catholic church in the nineteenth century excluded, then accepted, and then came to depend on women as leaders in church organizations.
But much more than a study of women and the church or the feminization of piety, the book links new female lay associations beginning in the 1840s to the surprisingly early politicization of Catholic women in Mexico. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials spanning more than a century of Mexican political life, Chowning boldly argues that Catholic women played a vital role in the church’s resurrection as a political force in Mexico after liberal policies left it for dead.
Shedding light on the importance of informal political power, this book places Catholic women at the forefront of Mexican conservatism and shows how they kept loyalty to the church strong when the church itself was weak.
The Frankfurt School's own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, these essays seek to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century.
Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth.
Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of - and perhaps even practical betterment - of our increasingly troubled world.
LA RAZON DESPUES DE SU ECLIPSE: SOBRE LA TEORIA CRITICA TARDIA (2023) BY MARTIN JAY; TRANSLATED BY FERNANDO HUESCA
After examining ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay addresses the ways in which Frankfurt School theorists sought to safeguard a concept of reason after its apparent eclipse.
UTOPIA Y DIALECTICA: ENSAYOS SOBRE HERBERT MARCUSE (2023) BY MARTIN JAY, TRANSLATION BY LEANDRO SÁNCHEZ MARÍN & SEBASTIAN DAVID GIRALDO
The refusal to imagine the "other" society beyond capitalism is not unrelated to the Jewish prohibition on naming or describing God. Whatever the source of the taboo, of the main figures related to the Frankfurt School, only Marcuse has dared in recent years to break it. Only Marcuse has attempted to say the unspeakable in an increasingly urgent effort to reintroduce a utopian mold to socialist theory.
WHEN JEWS ARGUE: BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITY AND THE BEIT MIDRASH (2023) EDITED BY ETHAN B. KATZ, SERGEY DOLGOPOLSKI, & ELISHA ANCSELOVITS
This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges.
The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education; pain, sexual consent, and ethics in the Talmud; the place of reason and devotion among Jewish thinkers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Taubes, Sarah Schenirer, Ibn Chiquitilla, Yair ayim Bacharach, and the Rav Shagar; and Jewish law as a response to the post- Holocaust landscape. The authors are scholars of rabbinics, history, linguistics, philosophy, law, and education, many of whom also have traditional religious training or ordination.
The result is a book designed for learned scholars, non-specialists, and students of varying backgrounds, and one that is sure to spark debate in the university, the Beit Midrash, and far beyond.
REACTIONARY MATHEMATICS: A GENEALOGY OF PURITY (2023) BY MASSIMO MAZZOTTI
A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena. The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics.
For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti’s penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.
BEFORE THE MOVEMENT: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS (2023) BY DYLAN PENNINGROTH
The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.
In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself—the laws all of us live under today.
Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story—their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life—a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself—the laws all of us live under today.
LIVING AND WORKING IN WARTIME CHINA (2022) EDITED BY BRETT SHEEHAN & WEN-HSIN YEH
Covering the years of Japanese invasion during World War II from 1937 to 1945, this essay collection recounts Chinese experiences of living and working under conditions of war. Each of the regimes that ruled a divided China—occupation governments, Chinese Nationalists, and Chinese Communists—demanded and glorified the full commitment of the people and their resources in the prosecution of war. Through stories of both everyday people and mid-level technocrats charged with carrying out the war, this book brings to light the enormous gap between the leadership’s demands and the reality of everyday life. Eight long years of war exposed the unrealistic nature of elite demands for unreserved commitment. As the political leaders faced numerous obstacles in material mobilization and retreated to rhetoric of spiritual resistance, the Chinese populace resorted to localized strategies ranging from stoic adaptation to cynical profiteering, articulated variously with touches of humor and tragedy.
These localized strategies are examined through stories of people at varying classes and levels of involvement in living, working, and trying to work through the war under the different regimes. In less than a decade, millions of Chinese were subjects of disciplinary regimes that dictated the celebration of holidays, the films available for viewing, the stories told in tea houses, and the restrictions governing the daily operations and participants of businesses—thus impacting the people of China for years to come. This volume looks at the narratives of those affected by the war and regimes to understand perspectives of both sides of the war and its total outcomes. Living and Working in Wartime China depicts the brutal micromanaging of ordinary lives, devoid of compelling national purposes, that both undercut the regimes’ relationships with their people and helped establish the managerial infrastructure of authoritarian regimes in subsequent postwar years.
IN MEMORIAM
JOHN L. HEILBRON, 1934-2023
Dear friends,
It is with deep sadness that I share news of the death of John L. Heilbron, Professor Emeritus of History of Science and former Vice Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. John passed away in Padua, Italy, on Sunday morning, November 5, 2023, at the age of 89.
A prolific scholar of prodigious range, John Heilbron was born in San Francisco on March 17, 1934, and attended Lowell High School. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving the Bachelor of Arts (1955) and Master of Arts (1958) in Physics and his Ph.D (1964) in History. After a brief stint at the University of Pennsylvania, John joined the faculty of the Department of History in 1967 and in 1973 became the founding director of the Office for History of Science and Technology. Along with advancing historical research and training the next generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, John gave himself to administrative service at Berkeley. Upon his retirement in 1994 he devoted himself to scholarship and travel with his wife Alison. The leading historian of the physical sciences of his generation and the possessor of great scholarly acumen and critical judgment, John helped transform the history of science into a professional discipline and made Berkeley into a crucial node in its international networks.
John’s scholarship extended from the history of early modern European astronomy and natural philosophy to the revolutions of twentieth-century physics. Like no other historian of physics of his era, he held the entire sweep of his field’s history in view. The author of more than twenty books, many additional book- length studies, and crucial resources for the discipline, he received the profession’s highest book prize, the Pfizer Prize, from the History of Science Society for his study The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories and was the recipient of the Society’s most prestigious award, the Sarton Medal. Among his
other major works were Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics; Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Volume 1, with Robert W. Seidel; The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science; Geometry Civilized: History, Culture, and Technique; and Galileo. John served as editor in chief of the Oxford Companion to the History of Science and editor of the Oxford Guide to the History of Physics and Astronomy. The recipient of honorary doctorates from Bologna, Pavia, Uppsala, and Yale, he also received a host of awards including the Koyré Medal from the Académie internationale d’histoire des sciences, the Sarton Memorial Lectureship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Hans Rausing Lectureship of Uppsala University, the Wilkins Prize Lectureship of the Royal Society of London, the Pais Prize for the History of Physics from the American Physical Society, the Hitchcock Lectureship of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Citation.
No less than his scholarly excellence, John’s administrative talents were manifest to all around him. Working with Thomas S. Kuhn, he helped build the project on Sources for History of Quantum Physics into a critical repository for the discipline. As director of the Office for History of Science and Technology, he welcomed scholars from around the globe to Berkeley and put his stamp on the field through editing the UC Press journal Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (now Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences) for a quarter century. He served as chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate and then as the Vice Chancellor of the campus.
Our most heartfelt thoughts go out to John’s wife Alison at this time of loss.
Sincerely, Cathryn Carson
EUGENE F. IRSCHICK, 1934 - 2022
Dear friends,
It is with great sadness that I convey news of the death of Eugene F. Irschick, a distinguished historian of South Asia and a member of the Berkeley History Department since 1964. Born in 1934, Gene passed away on November 10, 2022, in El Dorado Hills, California, at the age of 88.
Gene was born in India, the son of Lutheran missionaries. He was a graduate of the missionary- sponsored Kodaikanal International School. In later life he became sharply critical of the missionary project, but remained proud of Kodaikanal’s high academic reputation. Of the twelve boys in his high school class of 1949, eleven went on to obtain Ph.D or M.D. degrees. Gene came to the United States to attend Gettysburg College, from which he graduated in 1955 with a B.A. with honors in History and a minor in Greek and Religion. He then took an M.A in the University of Pennsylvania's South Asia Regional Studies Program, before entering the doctoral program in History at the University of Chicago. Immediately upon completion of his degree there in 1964 he joined the Department of History at UC Berkeley. He retired in 2010.
The first of Gene’s books was Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-1929 (UC Press, 1969), which grew out of his doctoral dissertation. The second, Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s (Crea, 1986) continued his engagement with the South India of his own childhood and youth. During the later years of his publishing career, he became engaged with postmodern theory and wrote a very different book, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795- 1895 (UC Press, 1994). Although the raw materials for this book remained those found in the history of the Tamil regions of India, Gene’s analytic approach was different. While his earlier work had been strongly empirical, this new work, inspired by the Russian social theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, offered a fresh approach to the history of India organized around cognitive structures. He was additionally the author of the textbook A History of the New India: Past and Present (Routledge, 2015).
Gene’s mentorship and care are warmly remembered by students and colleagues. A tribute can be found on the website of the Institute for South Asia Studies at this link(link is external).
At this time of loss, our thoughts go out to Gene’s wife Gabriela Gerlach of Folsom, California, his former wife Ann Feeney, and his children Jessica, Katherine, Michael, Duncan, and Sophie Charlotte.
Yours truly, Cathryn Carson
NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS, 1928-2023
The Department of History mourns the loss of Natalie Zemon Davis, who passed away on October 21, 2023. One of the most prominent and influential historians of her generation, Davis was our colleague at Berkeley from 1971 to 1978. Born in 1928 and educated at Smith College, Radcliffe, and the University of Michigan, Davis had a transformative impact on the field of early modern European history. She was pioneer in the history of women and gender, the history of global cultural exchange and a champion for the historical study of the disempowered. She was a charismatic teacher who inspired undergraduate students and trained generations of future historians.
Davis served as President of the American Historical Association in 1987 and reached wide audiences through, most notably, her best-selling book, the Return of Martin Guerre, which was made into a major motion picture. An anonymous donor has established a fundintheHistoryDepartmentinher honor, "related to any aspect of the history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, including their linkages with other peoples and societies."
For more information, the New York Times has published its obituary for Natalie Zemon Davis, and the American Historical Association’s series on its presidents includes her reflections on “Why Become A Historian?” Her reflections on her time in among us in Berkeley are available on our website here.
Our thoughts are with Natalie’s family and with her students at this time of great loss.
HISTORY ALUM GIFTS SEED FUNDS TO START THE NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS ENDOWMENT
- Hagit Capsi
The late History Professor Natalie Zemon Davis, who passed away this year, taught at UC Berkeley for six years. But in this short period of time, she made a lasting impact on many scholars. “In particular, for the students with whom she interacted,” says a Berkeley History alum, who recently donated seed money to start an endowment in Professor Davis’ name.
When the donor first met Professor Davis, her scholarship focused on the history of women, the sexes and gender. “She was deeply engaged in giving voice to the disempowered within the historical scope of early modern European culture and society,” says the donor, who wishes to remain anonymous. As the years went by, Professor Davis continued to expand her historical lens out into the Atlantic and beyond.
“Given the widening scope of her work and knowing that she was approaching the end of her life, I asked her directly what she wanted an endowment that I was planning to create in her honor to encompass," the donor said. "Following clearly articulated wishes she conveyed to me just a few weeks before she passed away, the endowment will support student and faculty research, workshops, and seminars related to the history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, including their connections with other peoples and societies.”
The donor's generous support established the Natalie Zemon Davis Endowment to continue to contribute to Professor Davis' far-seeing historical vision. To learn more about the donor's relationship with Professor Natalie Zemon Davis, continue reading here.
DONATE
Donors play a critical role in the ways we are able to sustain and enhance the teaching and research mission of the department. The History Annual Fund is utilized in the following ways:
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Travel grants for undergraduates researching the material for their senior thesis projects
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Graduate summer fellowships (often used to support research travel or language study)
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Conference travel for graduate students who are presenting papers or interviewing for jobs
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Prizes for the best dissertation and undergraduate thesis
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Equipment for the graduate computer lab
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Work-study positions for instructional support
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A graduate space coordinator position
Most importantly, the History Annual Fund allows the department to direct funding to students in any field of study, so that the money can be have the most impact. This unrestricted funding allows us to enhance our multi-year funding package so that we can continue to focus on maintaining the quality that is defined by a Berkeley degree.
To support the Department of History, please donate online at give.berkeley.edu or mail checks payable to UC Berkeley Foundation to the address listed on the inside cover of this newsletter. Thank you for your continued support!