Women in Technological History: A Society for the History of Technology

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book-and-mouseWomen in Technological History: A Society for the History of Technology
(SHOT) Special Interest Group (SIG)
http://www.historyoftechnology.org/interest_groups/index.html

WITH TRAVEL AWARD – A Call for “New Voices” in Technological History

The SHOT Special Interest Group Women in Technological History [WITH]
announces its travel award for 2014. The purpose of the award is to
encourage participation of “new voices” at the annual meeting of the
Society for the History of Technology [SHOT]. WITH invites applications
from scholars presenting topics or perspectives underrepresented in SHOT
as well as from individuals who can contribute to the annual meeting’s
geographic and cultural diversity.

The SHOT 2014 meeting will be held in Dearborn, Michigan, from November
6th to 9th. For meeting details, see:
http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html.

Eligibility for the WITH Travel Award is open to individuals who are
giving a paper at the SHOT annual meeting. Priorities for the WITH award
include supporting scholars or graduate students who are non-US,
non-Western or who are new to SHOT, belong to a group underrepresented in
SHOT, and or whose paper addresses issues of gender, race, ethnicity,
and/or difference in the history of technology.

The Travel Award is designed to help defray some of the costs associated
with attending the SHOT annual meeting.  Up to three awards may be
offered.  Awardees will receive a check for $250, with the possibility of
additional funds depending on stated need and WITH’s resources.  The
winner(s) will also be honoured as our guest(s) at the annual WITH
breakfast or lunch.

To apply, please send a cover letter and brief budget outlining
anticipated expenses associated with your trip to Dearborn (including any
grants or funding you have already received), an abstract of your proposed
paper with evidence that it has been accepted by the SHOT program
committee, and a one page curriculum vitae.  All application materials
should be forwarded to the chair of the award committee at
pedwards@shepherd.edu.  The application deadline for the WITH Travel Award
is July 5, 2014.

Pamela C. Edwards, PhD
History Department
Shepherd University
Shepherdstown, WV

Call for Chapters – Women and Genocide: An Anthology

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library imageThe editors of Women and Genocide: An Anthology to be published by Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc./Women’s Press in 2015, invite chapter submissions of original research from interdisciplinary scholars on narratives, memoirs, and testimonies of women survivors of the following genocides: North American indigenous, Armenian, Holocaust/Jewish, Holocaust/Roma-Sinti, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan.  This edited book examines the unique experiences of women in comparative genocidal contexts.  In our view, gender matters. We are interested in examining how women processed their identity as women in both a physical and emotional context. In a physical context we are interested in exploring how women addressed their gendered identity, for example, if they lost their hair, experienced amenorrhea, were forced to dress uniformly, or suffered sexual exploitation.  Emotionally, we are interested in understanding how women processed what was happening to them as individuals and their gendered roles as mothers, daughters, sisters, etc. in the larger genocidal context.

Our approach is a four point comparative framework derived from earlier Holocaust studies (Ofer and Weitzman 1998) that examines (1) the impact of culturally defined roles of women; (2) women’s “anticipatory reactions,” not just in the sense of what perpetrators would do to men, but to women as well. In examining anticipatory reactions, we explore women’s political and social awareness as the genocidal process unfolds; (3) the extent that women were treated differently than men; and (4) their reactions and processes as women to the physical and emotional circumstances of experiencing genocide. Each chapter should also contain a short historical summary of the genocide.

If you are interested in contributing a chapter, please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short bio-sketch by June 1st 2014 to Dr. JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz at digeorgj@tamug.edu or Donna Gosbee at gosbeed@msn.com.  If your abstract is accepted, you will be expected to submit a completed chapter (maximum 8000 words) by August 31, 2014.

Editors: Dr. JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz, Texas A&M University Galveston and Donna Gosbee, Texas A&M University-Commerce.

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=213086

Sharing Student Writings Across the Seven Sisters: History of Women’s Education Open Access Portal Project

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As we announced last week, we recently learned that our grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities has been successfully funded. For interested and curious members of the community, here are more details of the project:

The one-year planning grant we received is for an endeavor spearheaded by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education to lead a collaboration between the schools once known as the Seven Sisters, which include Bryn Mawr College, Barnard College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Vassar College, Wellesley College, and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. We have proposed to develop a shared approach to cataloging and providing access to digital versions of letters, diaries, and scrapbooks of the first generations of students of all seven schools.

The Seven Sisters schools were at the forefront of advanced education for women in the United States, educating many of the most ambitious, socially conscious, and intellectually committed women in the country. Going to college in the early years was not only an intellectually and socially awakening experience for these women, but it also provided an occasion for most of them to engage in extensive letter writing to family and friends, and to keep diaries and scrapbooks that preserved their impressions, ambitions, and memories of these first years of independence from home. Large numbers of these student writings are now preserved but siloed in the libraries of the seven schools, where they constitute an unparalleled and only partially tapped resource for the study of a wide range of women’s history issues over the last century and a half. The collections include discussions of race and class, political reform and women’s rights, sexuality and body image, the experience of being Jewish at predominantly Protestant institutions, interactions with students from Europe and Asia, and the experience of living through wars, the pandemic of 1918-1919, and the Depression.  This funding will allow us to make our collections more widely accessible to researchers and the general public through the development of a common search portal featuring digitized and transcribed facsimiles and an agreed-upon set of metadata and shared thematic vocabulary standards.

Currently, public use of the collections is impeded by their dispersal across the seven campuses and by the limited status of digitization of the items. The research value of these materials would be greatly increased by the ability to consider them as a whole body, rather than as associated fragments. The goal of this project, therefore, is to offer access to the papers through a single portal focusing on the experiences of students at women’s colleges. Since the value of a shared portal depends upon an agreed-upon set of standards for cataloging, taxonomy, transcription and digitization, a major part of the project’s work will be devoted to developing these standards.

The grant will fund one year of extensive planning between the schools, at the end of which we hope to embark on a program of digitization and transcription of student writings to be made accessible through the new portal. A longer-term goal is to implement a structure capable of accommodating digitized contributions from a wider group of institutions, further expanding the scope and utility of the aggregated collection.

Though the original visionary of the project, Jennifer Redmond, has since moved on, we look forward to working with Monica Mercado when she arrives in July to direct the Greenfield Digital Center in this next exciting phase of our work!

Bryn Mawr #7SistersWiki Edit-a-Thon: a Photo Story

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EditingCropLast week we successfully hosted our first Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon! After holding a test run and gathering advice from many experienced Wikipedians during early 2014, we convened a group of eighteen on Tuesday evening in Bryn Mawr’s Canaday Library to learn the ins and outs of editing from Mary Mark Ockerbloom and help close the Wikipedia gender disparity in honor of Women’s History Month.

Editathon sources

Sources for editing, heavily featuring the work of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

Planning began months ahead of time, and in the days and weeks leading up to the event we solicited ideas for new pages and articles to improve from those who planned to attend. We then collected a variety of printed sources to aid us in editing and creating that content, lists of records from Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections that could be linked to existing articles, and web sources for reference.

2014-03-25 16.17.15

Mary introduces Wikipedia

Mary opened the event with an informative talk detailing the key Wikipedia principles and culture, and methods for basic editing. Video footage of the talk is available at the bottom of this post, and slides are available here. After the presentation, we began editing our articles. Experienced Wikipedians moved around the room assisting those who were new to editing.

IMG_3324 (2)

Katy Holladay, Leigh-Anne Yacovelli, Joelle Collins, and Mary Mark Ockerbloom editing

Outcomes of the event: the Bryn Mawr Seven Sisters Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon was attended by 18 people, including seven staff members, four Bryn Mawr students, and seven local Wikipedians. Six attendees were new to editing the site.

The content we worked on is listed on the event page: together we created five new articles, two of which are public and three of which are currently in progress. We improved twelve existing articles and uploaded eleven images to Wikimedia Commons. We also created a Commons page for Bryn Mawr, so that all of the official College images we upload to Wikipedia can be centrally gathered and marked with an “institution template” that provides information about Bryn Mawr.

The most important outcome was empowering all 18 users to better contribute to the site as a resource for all. And, of course, Kimberly Wright Cassidy is no longer without Wiki-recognition! The page is very basic right now and we encourage everyone to add information to expand, improve, and interlink the information written there.

IMG_3331

Jeff and Elizabeth Guin from PhillyDH edit deviously

Happy editing!

http://www.viddler.com/v/4c118678

National Endowment for the Humanities Funds the History of Women’s Education Open Access Portal Project

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Student_studyingBryn Mawr has just been awarded a $39,650 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its “History of Women’s Education Open Access Portal Project,”  being run through the Greenfield Digital Center. This will be a one-year project to plan and conduct pilot work for an online portal to archival sources pertaining to the history of women’s higher education in the United States, and it is being done in collaboration with the special collections departments of the other Seven Sisters Colleges: Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.  We will be posting much more about this exciting project in the coming months!

Call For Papers: Queer, Feminist, and Transgender Studies Research Cluster

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Queer, Feminist, and Transgender Studies Research Cluster
2014 Conference
TransAmericas
University of California Davis
May 15 and 16, 2014

Call for Submissions
Deadline:  Friday, March 31

Keynote Speakers
Ana Minan Raquel
Rigoberto Gonzalez
Julio Salgado

2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a neoliberal program with intentions to bring modernity to Latin America. 2014 also marks 20 years since the Zapatista indigenous rebellion surfaced to resist draconian neoliberal structural policies that plague the Americas. Coming out of social movement struggles against neoliberal currents, it became clear that the role of gender and sexuality formed an equally essential part in the shaping of both grassroots and state institutions.

This conference will examine sexuality, gender, and feminism in the shifts taking place within the Americas as they affect the circuits of queer migration, the transnationalism of feminist discourses, and the reconceptualization of forms of gendered subjectivity in relation to transcultural exchange within the hemisphere.

Reflecting on the past 20 years, it appears that Latin America is leading the continent when it comes to recognizing gender and sexuality-based rights.  While the US still struggles with federal marriage equality and workplace protections for LGBT people, Brazil has recognized same-sex civil unions for a decade; Argentina granted its citizens, including those underage, access to free coverage for gender reassignment surgery and the right to legally change their gender. Uruguay, Colombia, and Mexico have followed suit.

Discussions about gender and sexuality are at the forefront of hemispheric scholarship.For instance, how does gender and sexuality disrupt monolithic notions of the Americas? Given the advancements of gender and sexual rights based movements throughout the Americas, what are the negotiations of constructing new social policies within an economic and social neoliberal hegemony?

By rethinking “trans” in its relation to the hemisphere, this conference seeks to move away from strictly comparative analyses by examining transmigrations across borders, cultural straddling, as well as problematizing and queering the concept of the Americas itself. How do migrations across the Americas queer national belonging? How does gender, sexuality, and desire shape circuits of labor and pleasure?

Attending to gender and sexuality in the Americas in this way opens new possibilities for inquiry into relations of heteronormativity, homonationalism and imperialism; peculiar socialities in local, national and transnational contexts; disruptions to conventional narratives of a panethnic Latino culture; transgressions and gender negotiations.In particular, we are interested in breaking down borders between U.S. American and Latin American studies, as well as exploring how sexuality and gender work to police borders and citizenship.

Possible topics include:

Trans Politics
Gendered Configurations of Cultural Memory
Encounters and “Des-encuentros”
Rights Discourse and the Pinkwashing of the Americas
Transnational Feminisms
Reproduction and Nationalism
Regulation and Policing of non-normativity
Social Histories of queer sexualities in the Americas
Territories of resistance and eco-feminism
Embodiment of borders
Xenopobia and criminality of immigrants
Politics of Translation
Colonial religion and sexuality
Sexuality and racial formation
Medicine and Sexual difference
Public health policies/ regulation of sex work
Heritage and performance of identity
Rethinking gender in diaspora studies

We welcome submissions in English, Spanish and Portuguese.  If you are interested in presenting, sharing or discussing, please send an email to: icporras@ucdavis.edu (subject line: Trans Americas CFP) by Friday, March 31  and indicate whether you would like to:

1.  Present a paper (if so, please provide a title and brief abstract in the email body (250 words max))

2.  Organize a panel (if so, please provide the panel title and a panel abstract with paper titles in the email body (400 words max))

2.  Share work-in-progress as part of a roundtable workshop (if so, please summarize your line of inquiry or research interests in the email body  (250 words max))

3.  Present a performance (if so, please include a title, brief description of performance, and website if applicable in the email body)

Feminist Scholars Digital Workshop

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book-and-mouseJune 16-22, 2014 is the Feminist Scholars Digital Workshop (#FSDW14 on Twitter), which can be found through HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, www.hastac.org). FSDW14 is an online, interdisciplinary, participant-driven workshop for scholars/individuals working on or interested in feminist-oriented research projects. The goal of this workshop is to create an online space where participants can share and exchange ideas/scholarship/ project plans.

Any participant who works within the areas of feminist research are invited to join this discussion, including, but not limited to:

  • Gender studies
  • Queer theory
  • Cyberfeminism
  • Critical Gender/Race Studies
  • Feminist Historiography

There may also be opportunities to serve as small group leaders for interested participants.

This event is free! And it is a great opportunity for anyone with an interest, project, thesis, or dissertation working with feminist rhetorics. If you’re interested, please sign up here by Monday, May 5: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BtHHoWDdrBDbTXqbmQ2kM_bEnR1cLjaVcYTNQsIZ2r8/viewform?usp=drive_web&edit_requested=true

@lbdehertogh

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=212062

Pennsylvania Hospital History of Women’s Health Conference 2014

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pages-flipThe Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, will host its Ninth annual
History of Women’s Health Conference on Wednesday, April 2, 2014.  The
History of Women’s Health Conference focuses on areas of women’s health
from the 18th century to the present.  Robert Aronowitz, MD, chair of the
Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of
Pennsylvania, will be our keynote speaker, presenting a history of breast
cancer from his book Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society
(Cambridge University Press, 2007).  He is also the author of the book
Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease and numerous
articles.

The History of Women’s Health Conference began in 2006 as part of the
Pennsylvania Hospital’s celebration of co-founder Benjamin Franklin’s
tercentenary.  Each year since, scholars from the humanities and health
care professionals gather to discuss the past, present, and future state
of women’s health.  The conference is jointly sponsored by the Obstetrics
and Gynecology Department and the Pennsylvania Hospital Historic
Collection.

We will again offer a lunch buffet for $10.  Lunch will take place in the
historic Pine Building.  Please send a check payable to the Pennsylvania
Hospital Historic Collections to: Pennsylvania Hospital Historic
Collections c/o Stacey Peeples, 3 Pine East Rm. 2, 800 Spruce St.,
Philadelphia, PA 19107.

Please RSVP by March 30, 2014 to Stacey C Peeples, Curator-Lead Archivist,
Pennsylvania Hospital: stacey.peeples@uphs.upenn.edu
When registering, please indicate if you would like to purchase the $10
lunch. Vegetarian option will be available.
Please call (215-829-5434) or e-mail with any questions or for more
information.

——————————————————————————————————

2014 History of Women’s Health Conference Program:
Zubrow Auditorium, 800 Spruce St., Philadelphia

Keynote: 7:30-8:30am
Robert Aronowitz, M.D., Professor & Chair, History and Sociology of Science,
University of Pennsylvania
“Do not delay”: early detection campaigns before mammography

Session One: 9am-9:50am
Karol K. Weaver, Associate Professor of History/Women’s Studies,
Susquehanna University
“That Awful Business”: Female Death Workers in Nineteenth-Century
Pennsylvania

Carol-Ann Farkas, PhD, Associate Professor of English
MCPHS University
Constructing the “Lady Doctor”: Femininity and Female Professionalization
in the Popular Press of the Late Nineteenth-Century

Session Two: 10am-11am
Gina M. Greene, Ph.D. , Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society
Scholar
University of Pennsylvania
Architecture in Utero: From Maternity Ward to Maternal Environment at the
Prentice Women’s Hospital (1975-1985)

Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
and History, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
“The Maternal Body in U.S. History:  Discipline, Fragmentation, and the
Potential for Empowerment”

Susan E. Klepp, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of History, Temple University
“The Pregnant Revolution: Women and Fertility in the New Nation”

Session Three: 11:10am-12pm
Carrie Adkins, Ph.D., Instructor, University of Oregon
This Is Catharine Macfarlane’s Life: Gender and Power in Twentieth-Century
American Medicine

Mary M. Mahoney, Ph.D. Student in History, University of Connecticut
“Taking a Literary Pulse: Ruth Tews and the Mystery of Bibliotherapy.”

***LUNCH*** 12:10-1:15pm

Session Four: 1:20-2:10pm
Kelly O’Reilly, Ph.D.  Student in History, Vanderbilt University
“Doctor-less” Birth Control: Bringing Birth Control to California’s
Migrant Workers, 1939-1942

Jennifer Fraser, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Toronto
“From Nuns to Natives”: The Postcolonial History of the Cytopipette,”

CLOSING COMMENTS: 2:10-2:15pm

Pennsylvania Hospital is an approved provider of continuing nursing
education by the PA State Nurses Association, an accredited approver by
the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on accreditation.

There is no conflict of interest on the part of any presenter. There is no
commercial support for this educational offering.  4.5 Nursing contact
hours will be awarded to nurses attending this program in its entirety and
submitting an evaluation for the program.

Call For Papers: Managing the Scene: Women in the Film Industry

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book-stack-and-ereaderManaging the Scene: Women in the Film Industry
An area of multiple panels for the 2014 Film & History Conference:
Golden Ages: Styles and Personalities, Genres and Histories
October 29-November 2, 2014
The Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club
Madison, WI (USA)
DEADLINE for abstracts: June 1, 2014

Area: Managing the Scene: Women in the Film Industry

Has there been a “golden age” for women working behind the camera—as writers or directors, for example, or as producers, editors, choreographers, costume designers, or set decorators? Women represented only 18% of the primary film management of the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2012, and directed only 4% of the fiction films slated for release in 2014. Just four women have been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director of a fiction film, and only one (Kathryn Bigelow in 2009) took home the trophy. Is the golden age of women as principal film managers gone, in a flicker? Or it is upon us? What traits characterize a film “managed”—directed, produced, edited, written, choreographed, or even critiqued—by a woman? And why might those traits be golden?

This area invites abstracts that trace—or perhaps anticipate—the histories of women operating behind the cameras, as directors, producers, assistants, scholars, and critics. Proposals might address topics such as

•         career paths and strategies adopted by women in the film industry
•         critical histories and controversies explored by feminist film scholarship
•         the participation of women in national cinemas
•         women filmmakers’ roles in shaping the “women’s film” and other genres aimed at female audiences (family melodrama, romantic comedy)
•         women’s involvement in traditionally male-oriented film genres, from the action film to science fiction
•         creative innovation in feminist documentary, animation, and new media
•         gendered venues such as Women Make Movies and Lifetime Network
•         women as active audience members, fans, and remixers

Proposals for complete panels (three related presentations) are also welcome, but they must include an abstract and contact information, including an e-mail address, for each presenter. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.filmandhistory.org).

Please e-mail your 200-word proposal by 1 June 2014 to the area co-chairs:

Debra White-Stanley
Keene State College
dwhitestanley@keene.edu

Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Central Connecticut State University
Ritzenhoffk@CCSU.edu