UC Santa Cruz professor of history Gail Hershatter will deliver the 47th annual UCSC Faculty Research Lecture on Tuesday, February 12, at 7 p.m. at the Music Recital Hall in the UCSC Performing Arts Complex.
A reception in the lobby will immediately follow the lecture.
Admission is free and open to the public
The annual Faculty Research Lecture is the foremost academic research honor bestowed by the UCSC Academic Senate.
Hershatter was selected for her pioneering field research and oral history among Chinese women, and for her major contributions to the history of women, labor, and sexuality.
The Academic Senate noted that “Hershatter has profoundly affected her chosen fields of study, giving them a true humanistic orientation by recovering the voices of those who were silenced, listening to those who were ignored, and teaching all of us how much there is to gain in understanding and appreciation, by learning to be better listeners.”
She will speak on the topic "Rural Women, Memory and China's Collective Past."
A specialist in Modern Chinese social and cultural history, Hershatter recently published The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011).
The book shares the life stories of poor, rural women who have previously been left out of the historical record.
During her 21 years at UCSC, four of them as Distinguished Professor, Hershatter has promoted research in the Humanities as co-director of the Center for Cultural Studies (11 years), and as the inaugural director of the Institute for Humanities Research.
Hershatter has published numerous scholarly articles and reviews, and also done consulting work on documentary films about topics ranging from the Cultural Revolution to the events of Tiananmen Square.
She has been honored with the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History; awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship; and been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences.
Hershatter was also elected by her peers as both vice-president, and then president of the Association for Asian Studies.
She additionally received the Dizikes Teaching Award from the UCSC Humanities Division in 2003.
Hershatter received her B.A. from Hampshire College, where she was a member of its inaugural class. She went to Princeton to pursue her interest in East Asian Studies and spent a year at Nankin University in Tianjin, China, before earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.
She joined the faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 1991 and has been with the campus ever since--except when she has been conducting research in the archives and fields of China.
Hershatter is currently chair of the UCSC Department of History.
