2016 Speaker Biographies: Women in World History

Beverly Bossler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on gender and social history, particularly the Song and Yuan dynasties. She is the author of Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000-1400 and the editor of Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters.
Contact: bjbossler@ucdavis.edu

Margaret Chowning is Professor of History at U.C. Berkeley. She teaches Latin American history broadly, but her research specialization is Mexico in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published two books and numerous articles, and is nearing completion of a third book with the title: "Catholic Ladies and Culture Wars: Gender, Church, and Politics in Mexico, 1750-1912."
Contact: chowning@berkeley.edu

JoAnn Conrad is a professor of Anthropology and Folklore at CSU East Bay. Her research focuses on narrative theory, gender, embodied knowledge, and the relationship between affect and the senses. Currently she is working on the role of illustration/illustrators in advertising and in popular culture (most specifically children's picture books and animated film), and on the historical (and uncredited) role of women in promoting this visual sphere in everyday life.
Contact: jac5353@aol.com

Corrie Decker is Associate Professor of History at UC Davis. Her book, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her work also appears in Past & Present, the Journal of Women's History, and other journals and edited volumes. She is coauthoring a book on the history of development in Africa for Cambridge University Press. Decker currently researches debates about childhood, sexuality, and custom in colonial East Africa.
Contact: crdecker@ucdavis.edu

Jeffrey Hadler first lived with a Minangkabau family as a high school exchange student in 1985. He studied comparative literature and Southeast Asia as an undergraduate at Yale and then Southeast Asian History as a graduate student at Cornell. He taught at the State Islamic University in Jakarta in 2000 before joining the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He has served as Chair of both the Center for Southeast Asia Studies and the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley. His book Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism won the 2011 Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.
Contact: hadler@berkeley.edu

Minoo Moallem received her MA and BA from the University of Tehran and her PhD from Université de Montréal. She has also done postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Berkeley from 2008-2010 and the Chair of Women’s Studies Department at San Francisco State University from 2001-2006.

Professor Moallem is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister. Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005, the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State, Duke University Press, 1999, and the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East on Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees. She has published in a number of feminist journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism, Nimeye Digar, Documentation Sur La Recherche Feministe, and Journal of Feminist Studies of Religion. Trained as a sociologist, she writes on transnational and postcolonial feminist studies, religious nationalism and transnationalism, consumer culture, immigration and diaspora studies, Middle Eastern studies and Iranian cultural politics and diasporas.
Contact: mmoallem@berkeley.edu

Elizabeth Pollard (BA, North Carolina State University and PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is a historian of the ancient world, in particular of Roman and Greek civilizations. She is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University, where she has been teaching since 2002. Pollard's research on witchcraft accusations against women in the Roman empire and Roman-Indian trade employs the methodologies of history, religious studies, classics, and women's studies. She was named SDSU Senate Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in 2013. Her pedagogical interests include the effectiveness of web-based technology and world history in teaching, learning, and writing about ancient history. Pollard teaches the world history survey regularly, and serves on the Executive Council of the World History Association. Recent publications include Worlds Together, Worlds Apart Concise Edition, with Clifford Rosenberg and Robert Tignor (W.W. Norton, 2015) and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart Companion Reader, 2nd Edition, with Clifford Rosenberg (W.W. Norton, 2016). See full list of her publications, with PDFs of journal articles and chapters, here
Contact: epollard@mail.sdsu.edu