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Miriam R. Silverberg
Director, 2000 - 2003
Miriam Silverberg, a Professor Emeritus of History and former Director of CSW, passed away early in the morning on March 16th. Miriam directed the Center from 2000 to 2003. She created the CSW Workshop Project that is still in existence today. One of these workshops, "Migrating Epistemologies," met up until 2007. Under Miriam's directorship, CSW sponsored a groundbreaking conference titled Feminism Confronts Disability. She also launched the first Biennial Women's Community Action Award Dinner (with the UCLA Women's Studies Program); a conference entitled Educating Girls: New Issues in Science and Technology Education; and a talk by Matsui Yayori on the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal. Miriam was a vibrant, productive, and important scholar. Despite debilitating illness over the last several years, she continued her research and writing and published Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times in 2007. She was a wonderful colleague and she will be greatly missed.
Obituary in LA Times
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| Biography |
Silverberg received her master's degree at Georgetown University and her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Her master's essay dealt with the massacre of Koreans in Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake. She carried her interest in Japanese colonialism in Korea to UCLA, where she encouraged graduate students to study Japanese and Korean modernity together. Her research interests include modern Japanese thought, culture, and social transformation; social and cultural theory; and comparative historiography. Her books include Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which received the 1990 John King Fairbank Prize in East Asian History.
She retired from UCLA in 2005.
Her most recent book, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (University of California Press, 2007) examines the history of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941
On December 7 and 8, 2007, the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies held a two-day symposium on "Imperial Japan and Colonial Sensibility: Affect, Object, Embodiment" to celebrate the work of Silverberg, who was its original organizer.
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| Accomplishments:
2000 to 2001 |
The major event of 2000 was the talk by Matsui Yayori, prolific author on topics related to women in Asia, and former chief correspondent in Southeast Asia for the leading Japanese newspaper, The Asahi Shmbun. Matsui, one of the three chief organizers of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal for the trial of Japan's military sexual slavery, spoke on the history, and legal implications of the Tribunal.
CSW offered a total of fifty-five programs in 2000-2001, twenty-six of which were solely initiated and organized by CSW. Notably, the CSW sponsored a conference Educating Girls: New Issues in Science and Technology Education on November 3, 2001, a panel on The Theory Question in Feminism on November 30, 2000, an International Women's Day Event, entitled Report from the Field: Women's Studies in Asia, with speakers Ellen DuBois and Rachel Lee, held on March 5, 2001, and a workshop with Natalie Zemon Davis on The Knot of Slavery: Joanna and Stedman in Suriname on April 30, 2001. The Center also hosted three receptions: the annual fall reception, the fourth annual Meet our Authors: Book Signing and Reception, in December 2000, and the Women's Studies 25th Anniversary: An Evening with Emily Levine, in January 2001. The Roe v. Wade Lecturer in 2000-2001 was Adele R. Clarke, who spoke on 100 Years of Contraceptive Research: Why Abortion is Still So Necessary on January 25, 2001.
CSW co-sponsored the Annual Lecture Series for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Program for the third year with a total of five programs, including the second annual QGrad conference. CSW also cosponsored a February 10, 2001 symposium, entitled Otro Corazon: Queering the Art of Aztlan, the fourth year of the Sociology and Gender Series, and the UCLA Byzantist's Colloquium, Byzantine Women: The Everyday Experience, which took place on April 7th, 2001.
Thinking Gender: The Eleventh Annual Graduate Student Research Conference was co-sponsored with USC for the eighth year and opened to other campuses in the region for the seventh year.
Former CSW Directors, Professors Sandra Harding and Kathryn Norberg, co-edited the leading feminist journal, Signs, which completed its first year of operation at UCLA in June of 2001. |
| 2001 to 2002 |
For 2001-2002, three themes were selected for programming concentration: 1) The Disciplines (to introduce new problematics and methodologies, along with debates between and within disciplines); 2) The Body of Los Angeles (including urban planning and the social and political dimensions to the geography along with the treatment of the body in Hollywood film and related issues); and 3) Engendering Transnational Cultures, which would attempt to make concrete the current interest in "transnationalism."
The CSW Workshop Project was initiated, putting together five groups of faculty members, with the goal of fostering intellectual community across the disciplines and enabling the groups to use their funding as a form of seed money to gain grants, which would be administered through CSW.
In addition to twenty-eight programs, CSW hosted two receptions, and cosponsored four lecture series and thirteen additional events including two symposia, five conferences, the campus-wide UCLA Women 4 Change 2002, and a 2-day performance of Vagina Monologues, which drew a total audience of 700 and raised $10,000 for the UCLA Clothesline Project for Battered Women.
The most successful event, drawing over two hundred people, was the February 15, 2002 day-long conference, Feminism Confronts Disability. Participants, including the key-note speaker, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Women's Studies, Emory University), a leading theorist in the world of disability scholarship, drew as varied an audience from as far away as Florida and New Mexico.
Thinking Gender: The Twelfth Annual Graduate Student Research Conference was co-sponsored with USC for the ninth year and opened to other campuses in the region for the eighth year. Featured were sixty-three graduate students from fifteen various local campuses.
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| 2002 to 2003 |
CSW cosponsored the first Biennial Women's Community Action Award Dinner with the UCLA Women's Studies Program. Held on November 14th 2002, this event was organized as part of long-term planning to respond to budgetary needs. The event honored State Senator Sheila Kuehl for her support of women's studies and her work on behalf of women and girls, and was attended by over 200 students, faculty, potential donors, community members and alumni.
CSW organized thirty-four events solely, and cosponsored twenty more. The Feminist Research Seminar Series offered graduate students an opportunity to earn one unit of credit each quarter by enrolling in Women's Studies 204 and attending three of the six seminars offered during the year.
Cosponsoring ongoing lecture series with LGBT Studies and Sociology, the CSW began to also sponsor a new lecture series, with Anthropology and Sociology, entitled Feminist Ethnographies, bringing in leading scholars such as Trinh T. Minh-ha (UC Berkeley), feminist anthropologists Sherry Ortner (Columbia), and Sylvia Yanagisako (Stanford). The screening of Trinh T. Minh-ha's new film, The Fourth Dimension, accompanied by her commentary, was a particularly successful event, drawing an audience of more the 200. The series also included a poetry reading by Los Angeles poet Terry Wolverton.
Thinking Gender: The Thirteenth Annual Graduate Student Research Conference was cosponsored with USC for the tenth year. Seventy-two graduate students, from thirty-four schools, participated. |
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