The 2020 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture

Linda K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of History Emerita, Lecturer in Law at The University of Iowa.

She received the AB from Barnard College and the PhD in history from Columbia University in 1968. In 2006 she was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.

Kerber is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as president of the American Studies Association in 1998, the Organization of American Historians in 1996-97, and the American Historical Association in 2006-07.

In her writing and teaching Kerber has emphasized the history of citizenship, gender, and authority. Her teaching has been recognized by the University of Iowa Graduate College Special Recognition/Outstanding Mentor Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts. She is the author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998) for which she was awarded the Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in U.S. legal history and the Joan Kelley Prize for the best book in women’s history (both awarded by the American Historical Association). Her other books include Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997), Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980), and Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (1970). She is co-editor of the widely used anthology, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (9th edition, 2020).

“The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other: A View from the United States,” appeared in the American Historical Review, February 2007 and is the foundation of her current research and writing. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, based in the Netherlands and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Statelessness and Inclusion, based in Melbourne, Australia. Following her interest vii in strengthening academic exchange between the United States and Japan, she served for five years as a member of the Japan, U.S. Friendship Commission/CULCON, a federal agency. She recently completed a term on the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, to which she was appointed by President Barack Obama.