The AHA has come and gone for another year, and as I recover from the inevitable post-holidays/post-travel/post-conference flu, I’ve been catching up on some of the sessions I missed. Over on Prof. Hacker, Jennifer Guiliano posted a great recap of digital history offerings at the conference, asking readers to think critically about the frequent slippage between digital history and public history. It’s worth a read. [link]
This year, for the first time, I was able to attend the Coordinating Council for Women in History Friday night reception as well as the Saturday awards luncheon, where Crystal N. Feimster blew us all away with her talk, “‘The (Civil) War on Women’: A Case for Women’s History.” I went home and renewed my CCWH membership right away; 2014 marks its 45th anniversary year:
Later that afternoon, Feimster joined the CCWH-sponsored panel “Generations of Women’s History,” which the AHA has filmed for our viewing pleasure; Claire Potter also blogged about the panel and its discussions of academia and motherhood, with potential elisions of other stories. I had been lucky to be invited to Julie Enzer‘s pre-conference convening, Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Scholars earlier in the week, a reminder that the questions Potter posed are important ones for our understandings of the history of women’s history:
All these deep thoughts and how do I show up on HNN? Complaining about the polar vortex. Despite the deep freeze, starting the year with so much women’s history is making me pretty excited for the Big Berks in May (my panel, on gender and sexuality in university archives, is scheduled for Sunday, May 25) — and I look forward to continuing many of these conversations in Toronto.
Monica L. Mercado, Ph.D. 