All-day women's history program to honor Joyce Berkman's retirement

History professor Joyce Avrech Berkman, who is retiring after 48 years of campus service, will be honored Friday, May 3 in the Cape Cod Lounge with a series of presentations on women's history followed by a reception and dinner.

Berkman, who is also adjunct professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, teaches courses in U.S., British and European women's history, oral history and the history of reproductive rights in the U.S. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Danforth Associate, she has also served as a Fulbright scholar and senior Fulbright professor in Germany. In 1980, she was received the Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus' top honor for classroom excellence. In 2009, she received the Distinguished Outreach Award in Research.

In recent years her major public history activities include directing the Valley Women's History Collaborative that oversees research, oral history and documentation projects of the history of feminist and lesbian activism in the Pioneer Valley from 1968 to the present. She has also been involved in a number of projects with K-12 social studies and history teachers. Assisted by a Visioning Grant from the College of Humanities and Arts, Berkman in 2008 coordinated an interdisciplinary docudrama, "Menace to Society," on the history of reproductive rights in Massachusetts with specific attention to the role of Bill Baird.

The keynote speaker for the retirement celebration is Berkman's former departmental colleague, Kathy Peiss, who is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Peiss will speak on "How to Change the World through Women's History."

The other presentations will focus on several topics: "Feminist Oral History as Organizing," "From Kitchen Table to Safe Haven: A Community Oral History Project of Domestic Violence Shelters" and "The DIFFERENCE of Women's History."

The program features speakers from Shepherd University, Hampshire College, Smith College, Emporia State University, Westfield State University, Schenectady County Community College, University Without Walls, Special Collections and University Archives, New England Learning Center for Women in Transition and the Valley Women's History Collaborative.

The presentations, which run from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., will be followed by a reception in the Graduate Student Reading Room in the Campus Center and a buffet dinner from 6-9 p.m. in the Cape Cod Lounge.

The program is co-sponsored by the History Department; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Five College Women's Studies Research Center; W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies; and Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Source: Umass