Three Endowed Chairs Named in Penn Arts and Sciences’ Department of History
Dean Steven J. Fluharty is pleased to name three faculty members to endowed chairs in Penn Arts and Sciences.
Kathleen Brown has been appointed David Boies Professor of History. Dr. Brown’s scholarship, which is characterized by novel approaches to the examination of issues of racial and gender hierarchies, particularly in colonial settings, and 19th-century attitudes about dirt and cleanliness and their moral, religious, and sexual implications, has offered important new insights to scholars and students of gender, race, and history. In her first book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, for which she received the American Historical Association’s John H. Dunning Prize, Dr. Brown innovatively examined gender and racial hierarchies through the prism of ordinary life rather than through reigning ideologies and official pronouncements. Similarly impactful, her second book, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, which is a cultural history that traces the moral, religious, and sexual implications of attitudes toward dirt and cleanliness during the period between Europe’s Atlantic encounters and the American Civil War, received both the Organization of American Historians’ Lawrence W. Levine Award and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Award.
Dr. Brown has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has taught for Penn’s Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute, and she has served on several committees in the Department of History, at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.
David and Mary Boies established this chair in 2003 when their daughter Mary was a junior in the College. It is named in memory of Mr. Boies’s father, who was a high school history teacher, and recognizes a faculty member working in the field of American history.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet has been named Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History. Dr. Kashani-Sabet is a prominent scholar of Iranian and Middle Eastern history. Her research addresses issues of national and cultural formation and gender concerns in Iran, as well as historical relations between the U.S., Iran, and the Islamic world. She is the author of highly influential works including Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946, which analyzed land and border disputes between Iran and its neighboring countries. These debates were pivotal to national development and cultural production and have significantly informed the territorial disputes in the region today. Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran, a wide-ranging study of the politics of health, reproduction, and maternalism in Iran from the mid-19th century to the Islamic Republic, received the Book Prize from the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies for outstanding scholarship in Middle East gender relations.
Dr. Kashani-Sabet is the recipient of an Institute for Advanced Study fellowship. For over a decade she has directed Penn’s Middle East Center as a Title VI National Resource Center and launched the modern Middle East major and minor undergraduate degree program. She has also served on the Faculty Senate and the SAS Dean’s Council on Diversity.
The late Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg received Penn’s Alumni Award of Merit in 1991. He and the late Honorable Leonore Annenberg were both emeritus trustees of the University. The Annenbergs endowed many chairs in Penn Arts and Sciences and made countless generous contributions to the University. They also founded the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958.
Beth S. Wenger, professor of history and chair of the Department of History, has been appointed Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor. Dr. Wenger is a preeminent scholar of American Jewish history. She has applied her mastery of the methods of social and cultural history to produce monographs and edited and co-edited collections that explore the creation and evolution of American Jewish identity, politics, gender, and religious life. Her book New York Jews and the Great Depression received high and sustained praise, and was awarded the Salo Baron Prize in Jewish History. A more recent monograph, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage, explores American Jewish collective memory.
Dr. Wenger has also been a prolific public historian. She is one of four founding historians who helped to create the core exhibition at the National Museum of American Jewish History. She advised the PBS series The Jewish Americans, and wrote the companion volume to the series, which was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Dr. Wenger’s co-edited works also include Gender in Judaism and Islam, Remembering the Lower East Side, and Encounters with the “Holy Land.”
Dr. Wenger is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of New York’s Center for Jewish History. She is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and the Association for Jewish Studies, and she serves on the academic advisory boards of the American Jewish Historical Society, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and Penn’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
The Moritz and Josephine Berg chair was established by the Estate of Alfred A. Berg in 1951 to support a faculty member whose interests include Judaica. Alfred Berg’s gift fosters intellectual inquiry and introduces ethical and religious values in higher education.
