UC BERKELEY DEPARTMENT of HISTORY WINTER 2020 NEWSLETTER 1 CONTENTS 03 CHAIR'S MESSAGE 17 CAREER DIVERSITY 04 DEPARTMENT NEWS 18 ALUMNI NOTES 09 FACULTY AT LARGE 19 IN MEMORIUM 13 BOOK REVIEWS 20 GIVE TO HISTORY Department of History University of California, Berkeley 3229 Dwinelle Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-2550 Phone: (510) 642-1971 Fax: (510) 643-5323 Email: [email protected] Web: history.berkeley.edu FOLLOW BERKELEY HISTORY: Facebook & Instagram @BerkeleyHistory Twitter @UCBHistory Campus images courtesy of UC Berkeley Public Affairs © 2020 2 Dear Friends of Berkeley History, ike all our Winter Newsletters, this issue spotlights versity Ph.D. dissertation titled “Medicine, Monaster- Lthe achievements of Berkeley History faculty during ies and Empire: Tibetan Buddhism and the Politics of the past year including our publications, prizes and fel- Learning in Qing China.” Based on two years of field- lowships, as well as new developments in our research work in Tibet, Stacy’s manuscript offers a pathbreak- and teaching. Underlying this record of conventional ing history of Tibetan medicine and medical institu- academic accomplishment, however, is the real story tions during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and their of our faculty’s success during 2020 – a story of finding relationship with both Buddhism and the State. As the a way to carry out the basic mission of the History De- department’s only Central Asianist, Stacy promises to partment in the face of COVID-19 and a punishing mix reanimate within Berkeley’s storied Asian history of adjacent crises. From moving abruptly to online program a subfield that has been dormant since the re- teaching mid-semester in Spring 2020 to converting tirement in 1992 of John Masson Smith Jr., a pioneer- full courses to a virtual format the following Fall, our ing historian of the Mongol Empire who passed away faculty have adapted and endured in remarkably cre- last year. ative ways. Many continued to work at an extraordi- An unusual triumph for Berkeley History this narily high level from home despite small children un- past year is the completion of the website Women in derfoot, tending to sick relatives, and coping with the Department of History, a labor of love, conceived extended periods of social isolation. And all have em- and carried out by Mary Elizabeth Berry, Class of 1944 braced a heightened responsibility to serve students Professor of History Emerita (with help from Preston as mentors, advisors, and supporters as well as teach- Hotchkis Professor Emeritus David Hollinger and His- ers during this most difficult and disorienting period tory’s peerless Communications Coordinator, Maya in our department’s recent history. While this has been Sisneros). It features data on the gender composition far and away my toughest academic year out of twen- of our faculty over time, a chronology of faculty ap- ty-five in the History Department, I have never felt pointments of women between 1958 and 2020, profiles prouder or more awestruck by the talent, the buoyan- of History’s first nineteen women faculty members, a cy, and the kindness of my colleagues. collection of original memoirs produced exclusively Among the happiest developments in our ranks for the site, and an accounting of female Ph.D. recipi- this past year is the addition of two remarkable col- ents from 1950 to 2000. Featured on the History leagues in Asian History. The first is Puck Engman, a webpage, the website is part of the Campus commem- native of Sweden, and specialist in post-1949 China orative initiative Celebrating 150 Years of Women at who completed his Ph.D. in Freiburg, Germany in 2020. Berkeley, launched in 2019 to honor “the remarkable Puck’s dissertation examines the history of actual ex- women who have studied at, worked for, and contrib- isting Maoism by exploring relations between China’s uted to UC Berkeley” since co-education was autho- revolutionary government and the class of people rized by the Board of Regents in 1870. labeled “capitalists” in the People’s Republic. Drawing Other elements of the Winter Newsletter speak on a massive trove of material from Chinese provin- for themselves and need no special introduction, but cial and municipal archives, Puck’s reconstruction and I would like to draw attention to reviews by Margaret analysis of the socialist state’s “capitalist problem” pro- Anderson, Nick Dirks and Janaki Bakhle of two fasci- vides a novel and fascinating angle of vision into China’s nating new faculty books by John Connelly and Abhishek post-1949 history, the field that he will be teaching at Kaicker. Please join me in celebrating the resilience Berkeley when he takes up his position in Spring, 2020. and the brilliant work in our History community! Recruited from the University of Indiana, our second new Asianist is Stacy Van Vleet, an historian of Central Peter Zinoman Asia with a specialty in early modern Tibet. Stacey is Department Chair currently revising for publication her Columbia Uni- CHAIR'S LETTER 3 MEET THE NEW FACULTY PUCK ENGMAN EAST ASIA "As someone interested in China's recent past, it is not hard to come up with reasons to be enthusiastic about joining the UC Berkeley faculty. The university stands out not only as the birthplace of outstanding work on Chinese history but also as a central node connecting Chinese students and scholars with peers from around the world. On a per- sonal level, I was struck by the spirit of inquiry among faculty and students alike during my visit to the Department of History earlier this year. Although our present moment is poorly suited for speaking of exciting prospects, I will admit that I very much look forward to continuing our conversations, in the virtual classroom for now and on the campus grounds when the time comes." Puck Engman is a historian of China in the postwar era, with a particular emphasis on the history of socialism. His research covers the socialist reorganization of state and society in the early People's Republic as well as the transition from socialism to capitalism towards the end of the twentieth century. As a member of the Maoist Legacy project, Engman helped build a digital archive, which collects, curates, and translates documents on historical justice from the People’s Republic of China. STACEY VAN VLEET INNER ASIA "Berkeley has a distinguished legacy in the study of Inner Asia. I am excited to build on Berkeley's incredible current resources in the fields of East Asia, South Asia, and Buddhist Studies (among others) to develop channels for transregional and interdisciplinary scholarship." Stacey Van Vleet is a historian of Tibet and Inner Asia. Her research and teaching are concerned with the place of Tibet in regional and global histories, and with how Tibetan historiography—and relatedly, that of contemporary states including China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Russia—has been shaped by modern transformations in knowledge, economy, culture, and governance. Her book in progress, Plagues, Precious Pills, and the Politics of Tibetan Learning in Qing China, examines the rise of a vast network of Tibetan medical institutions across Inner Asia during the period of Qing Empire (1644-1911), and its central role in imperial governance as well as in early twentieth-century state-building projects across the Tibetan Buddhist world. By charting different approaches to medical and social reform in the wake of Qing imperial disintegration, her work considers how efforts to redraw the boundaries of knowledge and communi- ty became constitutive of the politics of modern China and Tibet. NEW FACULTY 4 FACULTY UPDATES Earlier in the year, in TONY ADAMTHWAITE’S Britain, France and Europe, 1945-1975 (Bloomsbury 2020), Tony responded to Brexit with an analysis of how and why, despite a promising honeymoon, UK rela- tions with Europe soured. Now he’s writing a sequel – The Selling of Britain – a study of soft power, asking whether different strategies might have slowed or even stopped Britannia’s slide from power after World War II. “Archives are the problem. Current restric- tions to the British National Archives, as one research- er remarked, mean that ‘booking a visit is about as haphazard and difficult as booking Oasis tickets back in the 1990s’ (“Broken Records”, The Spectator, 24 October 2020).” World War II and the West it Wrought, Brilliant (Stanford University Press 2020) Berkeley colleagues (Cathryn Carson, Sandra Eder, Rebecca Herman, Christian Paiz - Ethnic Studies - and Daniel Sargent) participated. In August the editorial board of Princeton Universi- ty Press approved MARGARET CHOWNING’S man- uscript (title, still tentative: Catholic Women, the Church, and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940). Margaret will be making final revisions over the winter break. She published a fun article in Colonial Latin Ameri- Britain, France and Europe, 1945-197, can Review in February 2020, using some of the de- Adamwaithe (Bloomsbury 2020) licious and funny rebukes leveled by religious women at men and priests to make an argument about how In April of this year Stanford University Press pub- "enlightened" ideas seeped into the consciousness- lished World War II and the West it Wrought, which es of nuns. “I will be totally revising my Mexican MARK BRILLIANT co-edited with Stanford's David history lecture class for spring 2021, probably a crazy M. Kennedy. The edited volume grew out of a con- thing to do in another COVID semester when every- ference to mark the 75th anniversary of U.S. entry in thing to do with teaching takes so much longer than World War held at Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the in the pre-pandemic days; and I'm also teaching a American West, and in which a number of UC new graduate course on the urban history of Latin FACULTY UPDATES 5 America, lending more credence to the idea that I have lost my marbles.” JOHN CONNELLY has been giving talks on his re- cently published From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2020), virtually of course, in Washington DC, Stanford, and London, and has talks planned in the coming months in Seoul, Maastricht, and Warsaw.