Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Beth Salerno: I am putting together a Berks Roundtable (4-6 participants) titled: „Biography as a Conflict Zone: Borders, Encounters and the Meaning of Memory in the Writing of Women’s Lives“. My own work centers on a white, 19th century New England woman, but I would like to craft the panel as broadly as possible to explore the complexities of writing women’s biography across time, geography, race and discipline.

Biography-writing has always had the best potential to cross the academic/public border, though far more for European and American subjects than any other. Biographies of writers often blur the disciplinary line between historians and literary scholars. The expansion of the historical discipline into social and women’s history greatly expanded the number and types of biographies that could be written, but biographies of women still tended to focus on „wife of“, „daughter of“ or „mother of“ biographies until fairly recently. As we begin to write about women „on their own terms“, we raise highly problematic questions about what those terms are and how we connect women’s lives (often lived at the borders of world events) to the issues still central in the discipline. Source issues also still play a critical role in limiting the types of women, times and places we can write about in traditional ways. Finally, women’s lives long revolved around biological time more than politically structured time, raising interesting questions about biographical structure and the meaning of memory.

If you are interested in joining this roundtable, please contact Beth Salerno at bsalerno@anselm.eduwith a brief description of your work by December 15. Description shoudl include time period, geographic location, a description of your biographical subject and focus, plus a 1 page CV).

Beth Salerno
Associate Professor of History
Saint Anselm College
100 Saint Anselm Dr.
Manchester, NH 03102
bsalerno@anselm.edu
603 641-7049

Source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU