2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

It started with dissertations. As female graduate students spread across a variety of subfields in a large history department, we started meeting weekly to talk, critique, and revise our research proposals over milkshakes and french fries. Over a decade later, we have helped each other to win prestigious fellowships, cycle through the adjunct market, settle into permanent positions, negotiate relationships and parenthood, and navigate the early years of our careers. Like many of our female colleagues in the academy and working women in general, we have encountered challenges in work-life balance, the de-valuing of our expertise and contributions, and the ever increasing service and caretaking labor that seems to fall particularly on women. By the miracle of technology, we continue to hold our weekly meetings by video-conferencing, which has become a collaborative model for battling isolation, sustaining research and writing agendas, refining pedagogy and curricula, and to just keep going through both the day-to-day and the career-defining challenges ahead.

In this lightning session, we will trace the life-cycle of our writing group as it grows into a critical community of scholars. The way we work has become an alternative model for academic productivity that highlights the importance of community for women even across vast geographies. The individual presentations will highlight diverse experiences of what success looks like at different moments in our collective careers with a broader intellectual perspective toward how the modern American workplace—inside or outside the academy—might benefit from such collaborative professional communities of women.