International
Federation For Research in Women's History
Federation Internationale Pour La Recherche En Histoire Des Femmes
The current 5-year term of the existing IFRWH/FIRHF Board and Committee comes to an end in August. A nominating committee consisting of Franca Iacovetta (Canada), Christina Florin (Sweden) and Charlotte Macdonald (New Zealand) have been working to gather nominations for the new Committee which will take over at the Oslo conference in August. We are delighted to hear that the following have agreed to have their names put forward:
Nominated as officers:
Mary
O'Dowd (President)
Mary O’Dowd is a Senior Lecturer in History
at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research has concentrated on early
modern Ireland. She is author of Power, Politics and Land : Early Modern
Sligo 1558-1688 (1991) and numerous essays on sixteenth and seventeenth
century Irish history. She has co-edited a number of collections of essays
on women in Irish history and is one of the editors of the forthcoming Field
Anthology of Irish Writing, volume 4. Dr O’Dowd was one of the
organisers of the 1993 conference of Irish historians which focussed on the
history of women. She was a founding member of the Women’s History Association
of Ireland and is chairperson of the Management Committee of the Women’s
History Project. She has been chairperson of the Irish Committee of Historical
Sciences (the national committee of historians in Ireland) since 1997. She
is currently completing a book on women and Irish society, 1500-1800.
Pirjo Markkola (Vice-President)
Pirjo Markkola is assistant professor at the University of Tampere, Finland.
Since 1995 she has been correspondent and chair of the informal women's history
group in Finland. She has published widely on a variety of aspects of women's
and gender history in Finland and Scandinavia. In 1994 she co-edited a book
with Marianne Liljeström & Sari Mäenpää entitled eds.), Kvinnohistoriens
nya tmaningar: Från sexualitet till världshistoria, an anthology on the
new challenges of women's history and her most recent book is an edited collection
entitled Gender and Vocation. Women, Religion, and Social Change in the
Nordic Countries, 1830—1940 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society,
2000).
Karen
Hunt (Secretary-Treasurer)
Karen Hunt is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department
at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) where she teaches British women's
history and social history. She was a founder member of the Manchester Women's
History Group (est.1981) and sat on the steering committee of the Women's
History Network, 1994-9. She has published widely on differing aspects of
the gendering of politics, focusing in particular on British socialist women.
Her Equivocal Feminists (CUP) was published in 1996 and her book on
socialist women, with June Hannam, will be published in 2001. She is also
working on the life and politics of Dora Montefiore (1851-1933), who was among
other things: a socialist, a suffragist, a communist, an internationalist,
a poet, a journalist, a traveller and a 'difficult woman'.
Eileen Boris (Newsletter Editor)
Nominees for the IFRWH/FIRHF Committee
Shirin Akhtar has have been a a permanent faculty member in the
Department of History, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka - 1342, Bangladesh
since 1978. I am engaged in teaching and research mainly in Modern South and
Southeast Asia and the South Pacific Region. My original research was on the
Land Control and Landed Society of pre-Modern Bengal, which earned me a Ph.D.
from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1973.
Apart from a Book, I have number of publications on the History and Heritage
of pre-Modern Bengal including one, highlighting the role of a celebrated
female landed gentry. My
present research relates to post-Cold War developments in South and Southeast
Asia.
As I seek to know about values, systems and biases which make up human history,
I seek to travel to attend Seminars and Conferences at home and abroad. My
recent interest in Gender Study is an addition to that. Besides membership
of a number of academic organizations, I am one of the founder members of
the Dhaka South-West Business and Professional Women's Club. I have associated
with the IFRWH as the national Convenor since its inception in 1996.
Noriyo Hayakawa is a lecturer at the Ferris Women's University, Waseda
University and Yokohama National University. She is former president of the
Association for Research on History in Tokyo and work in the field of the
history of gender and the family in modern Japan. In 1993 she published Women
during Wartime: Japan, England and Germany and in 1998 The Emperor
System and Gender in Modern Japan.
Alison
Mackinnon is Professor of History and Women's Studies,
and Director of the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia.
Her research seeks to make women's education central to historical debates
in a range of areas including its impact on family formation, gender relations
and challenges to religious and intellectual thought. She has written three
books and jointly edited five others. Love and Freedom: professional women
and the reshaping of personal life (CUP, 1997) won the NSW Premier's Literary
award for literary or cultural criticism in 1997.
Mrinalini Sinha teaches South Asian history and British imperial history
at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. In the Fall of 2000 she will
be joining the History Department and Women's Studies Program at Pennsylvania
State University. Her books include Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman'
and the 'Effeminate Bengali' In The Late Nineteenth-Century (Manchester,
1995; Kali 1997); Selections from Katherine Mayo's 'Mother India' (Kali
1998; Michigan 2000); and Feminisms and Internationalism [co-edited
with Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott] (Blackwell, 1999). She is currently
working on a book-manuscript on the construction of the "Indian"
modern in the 1920s and 30s against the background of the emergence of an
autonomous all-India women's movement and its connections to the interwar
international women's networks.
Sylvia Van Kirk has taught History and Women's Studies at the University
of Toronto, Canada since 1975. She has developed courses in Canadian women's
history and first-wave feminism at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
Her own research focuses on gender and race issues in the development of
Western Canada. She is best known for her study of the role of women in fur
trade society, entitled "Many Tender Ties": The Role of Women
in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1879 ( Winnipeg: 1980) and
has numerous articles on this and related subjects. Her current research deals
with aboriginal/non-aboriginal marriage in colonial Canada. She was a commentator
at the Melbourne Conference of the IFRWH in 1998 and is most interested in
comparative cross-cultural history. She will be the rapporter for the Colonial
Encounters session at the Oslo Conference. She has also had considerable administrative
experience, serving as Chair of Women's Studies and Graduate Co-ordinator
and Associate Chair of the History Department.