Ena H. Thompson Lectureship, week of March 4 through 7, 2013

Ena H. Thompson endowed these annual lectures in 1980 to encourage a broader understanding and appreciation of history.  The visiting lecturers are elected both on the basis of their past contributions to the discipline and of the importance of their current research in advancing the field.

Generally offered in the Spring Semester, the lectureship brings a distinguished historian to the Pomona College campus for a week of intensive interaction with students, faculty, and alumni.  The two public lectures become the core for discussion, with the final alumni dinner talk as the capstone.

Ena Thompson 2013

Gail Hershatter a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.   Her books include The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 (1986), Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (with Emily Honig, 1988), Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (1997), Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (2007), and The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011). She is Past President of the Association for Asian Studies (2011-2012).

Tuesday March 5 Lecture: “The Girl Who Burned the Banknotes, or Why Our Stories about the Chinese Revolution are not Good Enough”             

This lecture examines the most common stories that scholars and other observers have told about gender and social change in the Chinese revolution.  Focusing on the life history of one young rural woman, it considers how those stories might be made richer and more complicated.

 

Thursday March 7 Lecture: “Rattling the House that Gender Studies Built: Some Thoughts from Rural China”  

 Drawing examples from research in rural northwest China, this lecture explores what feminist scholars have learned about gender as we have developed the field of women's studies, and what other angles we might want to consider.