University of Michigan chair named for Penn history professor
October 14, 2003
A newly appointed chair holder at the University of Michigan has named her professorship in honor of Penn faculty member Mary Frances Berry.
The new Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professorship in History and American Culture is held by former Penn history professor Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Professor Berry, who is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in Penn’s history department, is a former member of the Michigan faculty. She received her Ph.D. and J.D. there and received an honorary degree in 1997. It is a tradition at Michigan for holders of collegiate professorships to name their chairs for former faculty members or other notable members of their fields.
Professor Berry is the chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians; assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and acting U.S. commissioner on education. She also has been chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder and provost of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park.
She has received numerous awards, including the NAACP's Roy Wilkins Award, the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement Award. She is the author of Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1982), The Politics of Parenthood: Childcare, Women’s Rights and the Myth of the Good Mother (1993) and Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present (1999).