Annual Newsletter 2007_Full.pdf - Department of History, UC Berkeley

Friends of Cal History Annual Newsletter 2007Dear Friends,Greetings from the ChairWith this new electronic newsletter, I send you the warmest holiday greetings. All of us who have had a hand in this projecthope that you welcome the format, which allows us (among other things) to include a substantial photo gallery as well as avideo clip of Professor John Efron playing blues guitar during a recent holiday party for the faculty and staff. John's wonderful(eye- and ear-opening) performance is now part of our collective e-memory. We also hope to add responses from readerson a periodic basis. Do send us by email (history@berkeley.edu) any notes you might like to contribute to the "Your Mail"section of the newsletter.The greatest blow of the year, as many of you know, was the loss of our beloved colleague Gerry Feldman on Octoberthirty-first. Gerry was at the core of our work and our strength since 1963, when he joined the faculty as an assistantprofessor. We grieve with his family and lean every day on his legacies.Our lives have also been deeply changed by the retirement last spring of our colleague Leon Litwack after forty-three yearsof teaching at Berkeley (and more than a few studying here as well). A celebrated scholar and teacher (legendary for hissignature course 7B, U.S. History from the Civil War to the Present), Leon has added to armfuls of honors with his recentappointment as president of the Southern Historical Association and receipt of its highest tribute, the John Hope FranklinLifetime Achievement Award. We trust he has several lifetimes to go as an inspiration and tireless counselor to ourcommunity.You will find much more news about the faculty throughout this newsletter. Let me draw particular attention to theintroductions to our three newest members (Mark Peterson, Ethan Shagan, and Jonathan Sheehan) and to the interview withThomas Laqueur. Apparently Tom, too, is old and virtuous enough for a career award (which I prefer to regard as a midcareermarker). The Mellon Foundation has just granted him a (monumental) Distinguished Achievement Award. Theseawards provide "recipients and their institutions with resources for furthering scholarship and teaching. Amounting to as muchas 1.5 million dollars each over the course of three years, the awards also call attention to the role the humanities play inAmerican intellectual life."There is also great news on the graduate program front. Thanks to years of work by many peerless workers (preeminentlyProfessor Mark Healey and Student Affairs Officer Barbara Hayashida), we launched with the admission of our currententering class a five-year funding plan for every new graduate student. This is possible because of significant new gifts,scrupulous husbanding of endowments, and the coordination of all projected resources. We are not entirely home free on thefinancial front. Nor are our five-year packages as generous as those of our wealthy private sisters. But through the enormoussupport of our splendid donors, we are definitely in the funding game.We have always been leaders in the intellectual enterprise. Our graduate students remain among the very best in theprofession. One clear indication is our continuingly high and distinguished record of placement. We awarded twenty-sixdoctoral degrees during the past year. And, as you will see, thirty-two of these and other recent Ph.D. recipients securedappointments since last December, twenty of them in tenure-track assistant professorships. For other news on the activitiesof current graduate students, click to the section on the Graduate Student Association.You will also find descriptions by several of our undergraduates of the research trips they were able to undertake this year