Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

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Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is an American academic and author who is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies, emerita, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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Smith-Rosenberg is known for her scholarship in U.S. women's and gender history, and for her contributions to developing interdisciplinary programs and international scholarly networks addressing women's history, gender studies, the history of sexuality, and cultural and Atlantic studies.

Smith-Rosenberg's article, "The Female World of Love and Ritual", has been described as creating "a template for how feminists could literally make history" (Potter, 2015). Her article "Discovering the Subject of the Great Constitutional Debate", was awarded the Binkley-Stephenson Award by the Organization of American Historians in 1993. Smith-Rosenberg's book, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity, won a Choice Award for Distinguished Scholarly Book in 2011.

Early life and education

Smith-Rosenberg was born in Yonkers, New York, March 15, 1936, to Carroll Smith and Angela Haug Smith. She grew up near Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx. Her heritage included a Caribbean grandfather, two centuries of slave-holding ancestors, and "on both sides, Irish grandmothers who didn't speak to one another" (Smith-Rosenberg, 2007).

Smith-Rosenberg obtained a BA from the Connecticut College for Women (1957) and her MA (1958) and PhD (1968) from Columbia University, where she worked with Richard Hofstadter and Robert Cross (Smith-Rosenberg, 1971). From 1972 to 1975 Smith-Rosenberg held a post-doctoral fellowship in psychiatry at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught.

Scholarship

Early scholarship

Smith-Rosenberg has described her scholarly career trajectory as "built around forty years of university teaching, scholarly friends around the world, and ... an increasingly progressive political vision" (Smith-Rosenberg, 2007). She said that the political feminism of the 1960s led her to reshape the questions she asked and to push the boundaries of both the methods and the conceptual frameworks of traditional history (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 11).

Smith-Rosenberg's principal goal was:

to so redefine the canons of traditional history that the events and processes central to women's experience assume historic centrality, and women are recognized as active agents of social change. (DuBois et al., 1980, pp. 56–57)

According to Smith-Rosenberg, her early scholarship focused on problems of urban poverty in Victorian America and the ways in which an emerging bourgeois elite attempted to understand and contain them (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 20).

Smith-Rosenberg's first book, Religion and the Rise of the American City, was published in 1971. The book contained a study of the American Female Moral Reform Society, which she termed a "uniquely female institution" (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 11), During her research, Smith-Rosenberg, said that she discovered a passionate 40-year correspondence between two women. Suddenly, Smith-Rosenberg has recalled, "everywhere I looked, the private papers of ordinary women beckoned" (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 27).

"The Female World of Love and Ritual"

In 1975 Smith-Rosenberg published the article, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America". It was presented at the second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (Melosh, 1990), and published as the lead article in the first-ever issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1975).

Other publications

Smith-Rosenberg went on to publish numerous articles addressing sexuality and gender relations in nineteenth-century America, many of which were collected in her second book, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985).

Discussing the collection in The New York Times Book Review , Elizabeth Janeway (1985) wrote that "few historians have used the stream of myth and history so productively"; the book, she noted, "suggests a restructuring of the way we see history by presenting the reactions of men and women to the shock of industrial upheaval, and the interplay between their variant visions".

New Family planning group

In the 1980s Smith-Rosenberg was one of the principal organizers of the New Family and New Woman Research Planning Group. The group brought together feminist scholars from the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy.

The planning group "believed we had a historical mandate to identify new domains, create new institutions, or try to carve out places for ourselves in areas that had previously excluded, devalued, and ignored us" (Friedlander et al., 1986). The group's activities resulted in the volume, Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (1986), edited by Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Smith-Rosenberg.

This Violent Empire

In 2010, Smith-Rosenberg published This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity.

Her latest book project both continues Smith-Rosenberg's interest in American "Others" and reaches back to her own Caribbean heritage. The project explores the concept of modern citizenship as emerging from intense interactions among four violent events in the Atlantic world: the U.S., French, Haitian and Irish revolutions. It

focuses on the complex triangulation of race, slavery, and gender, using them to examine the contradictions and ambivalence lying at the heart of both citizenship and, most especially, of liberal political thought. (Aspen Institute, n.d.)

Teaching

Smith-Rosenberg began her teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s when few women found positions in Ivy League institutions, teaching initially as an adjunct in the School of General Studies. In 1972 she became an assistant professor in both the psychiatry and the history departments of the university. At Penn she founded and served as an early director of the university's Women's Studies Program (1982–1995).

From 1996 until her retirement in 2008 Smith-Rosenberg taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies (emerita). At Michigan, she served as graduate chair of the American Culture Program and director of the Atlantic Studies Initiative, which she helped establish. She has also been a visiting scholar at academic institutions, including Columbia University, New York University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes des Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Major publications

Academic appointments

Research fellowships

Awards and prizes

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