Pal Wins American Historical Association Prize
History faculty member Carol Pal has been named winner of the American Historical Association's 2013 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for her book Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century.
The Kelly Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association (AHA) to honor the book in women’s history and/or feminist theory that best reflects the high intellectual and scholarly ideals exemplified by the life and work of Joan Kelly. The prize will be awarded during a ceremony at the Association’s 128th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, January 2–5, 2014.
Pal’s book was selected from more than 70 entries by a prize review committee of AHA members. “Deftly combining biography, social, religious, cultural, and intellectual history, Pal's Republic of Women challenges everything we thought we knew about the supposedly masculine republic of letters,” noted Sheryl T. Kroen, the 2013 Kelly Prize committee chair, associate professor of history and interim director of the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. She continued, “Filling the seventeenth century shelf in Virginia Woolf’s imaginary library, she also explains how we came to believe it was empty!”
The Kelly Prize was established in 1984 in memory of Joan Kelly (1928–82) by the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession and the Conference Group on Women’s History (now the Coordinating Council for Women in History).
AHA is a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies. The AHA provides leadership for the discipline, protects academic freedom, develops professional standards, aids in the pursuit and publication of scholarship, and supplies various services to sustain and enhance the work of its members. As the largest organization of historians in the United States, the AHA is comprised of more than 14,000 members and serves historians representing every historical period and geographical area. For further information, visit the American Historical Association website.