Gender historians featured at Great Lakes History Conference 2008

"Gender and Society: Explorations, Discoveries, and Revelations in a Gendered World," is the theme of the 33rd Annual Great Lakes History Conference at Grand Valley State University.

A particularly noteworthy feature of this year’s conference is that it will run in conjunction with the first ever U.S. Intellectual History Conference. The USIH Conference is co-convened by Paul Murphy of Grand Valley’s History Department and Tom Lacy of Loyola University, Chicago.

The GLHC panels will be staged concurrently with the USIH panels, and approximately 112 leading national and international scholars will participate in the joint conference. Panel discussions will range from exploring the history of women’s reproductive rights and legal representation to equality in higher education and the depiction of women in the media, literature and popular culture.

The two-day conference, October 17-18, on Grand Valley’s Pew Grand Rapids Campus, brings together academics and independent scholars from across the country to share their research and cultivate interdisciplinary work. The cost for the complete conference is $35, which includes the lunch on Saturday.

Judith P. Zinsser is the keynote speaker at the Saturday lunch, at 12:45 p.m., in the L.V. Eberhard Center, 301 W. Fulton. The professor in women’s studies at Miami University is a former president of the World History Association and representative at the United Nations World Councils. She will address the future of women’s history in a worldwide context. Her most recent book is La Dame d’Esprit: a Biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet (Viking 2006). 

The Friday evening keynote speech, at 8 p.m. in Loosemore Auditorium in the DeVos Center, 401 W. Fulton, is free and open to the public. It will feature Bonnie S. Anderson, Broeklundian Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She will address the last 30 years of women’s history. Her most recent book, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement 1830-1860 (Oxford UP, 2000), demonstrates how early radical feminists in Britain, France, German and the U.S. came together to form the world’s first international women’s movement. 

Zinsser and Anderson co-authored the 1988 classic, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, a publication whose 20th anniversary will be celebrated and recognized at this year’s Great Lakes History Conference. 
 
The conference is made possible with support from Grand Valley’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Dean’s Office, Office of the President, the Department of History and the Ryerson Foundation of the Grand Rapids Public Library.  For more information and a complete schedule, visit www.gvsu.edu/history , or call co-conveners Scott Stabler or Craig Benjamin in the Department of History at (616) 331-3298.