Rachel Fuchs Memorial Award

The Coordinating Council for Women in History have decided to honor the memory of our recently departed Rachel Fuchs with an award that recognizes and applauds service to the profession, including mentoring. The Rachel Ginnis Fuchs Memorial Award of $500 will be given annually to celebrate an individual whose service is most representative of Rachel’s own.

The breadth of Rachel’s service to her chosen profession is truly awe-inspiring. Rachel’s abundant scholarship is widely read and she was and is acknowledged as a leader in her field of French History. Yet Rachel was so much more to her students, her peers, and her colleagues at many different institutions and in numerous organizations. Rachel was deeply committed to women’s rights, women’s history and to supporting women in the historical profession. Rachel worked diligently to serve the historical profession as a mentor, a role model, an activist and as a friend. Rachel served as President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, as President of the French Historical Society, and most recently, as co-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History, 2013-2016.

The annual deadline for the Fuchs award is 2 April.

Rachel Fuchs Memorial Award for Excellence in Mentorship and Service to Women/LGBTQ in the Profession 2020 Rachel Fuchs Award (MS Word download)

Committee email: FuchsAward@theccwh.org

Donate

Donations by CCWH members and other patrons help endow this memorial award that honors our friend and colleague, Rachel Fuchs. Contributions from $100 to $10,000 would be most appreciated. To make a one-time or recurring monthly donation by credit or debit card, please fill out our secure online Donation Form.

The Coordinating Council on Women in History is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations to the Catherine Prelinger Award are tax-deductible.

Read more about the life of Rachel Fuchs

Past Rachel Fuchs Memorial Award Recipients

2018 Co-Recipient Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor of American, Labor, and Women’s History in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she also teaches African-American and Global History. Dr. Boris’s research focuses on the intersection between women’s history and labor history. Her work has critically interrogated the invisibility of women’s work in the home; wage gaps and inadequate protections for domestic workers; and the world-wide feminization of poverty. She is the author of Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Temple University Press, 1986) and Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 1994), which was awarded the Philip Taft Prize for Best Books in Labor History. With the co-author Jennifer Klein, she has also written Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. WithRachel Salazar Parreñas, Dr. Boris has also co-authored Intimate Labors: Care, Sex and Domestic Work (Stanford University Press, 2010); with S.J. Kleinberg and Vicki Ruiz, The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Dialogues, and Intersections (Rutgers University Press, 2007); and with co-winner of the 2019 inaugural Rachel Fuchs Award, Dr. Nupur Chaudhuri, Voices of Women’s Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional (Indiana University Press, 1999).

A mentor to junior colleagues, as well as her students, Dr. Boris has also co-authored numerous additional books and essay collections. Her articles have appeared in such scholarly publications as The Journal of Women’s History (for which she currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees); Journal of Policy History, and Politics and Society; as well as The Nation and Dissent. Dr. Boris has also authored policy white papers on women and labor; served as co-chair of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women; served as a member of the Executive Committee for the Social Science History Association and as President of the International Federation in Women’s History. This year, she has been named as Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.

From 2003-2007, the Coordinating Council on Women and History benefited from Dr. Boris’s leadership as co-president. It is with great pleasure that the CCWH recognizes Dr. Boris’s outstanding contribution to the study of women; advocacy for women; the mentoring of young scholars; and service to her colleagues as champion of the CCWH—an organization to which the late Rachel Fuchs was also devoted.

2018 Co-Recipient Nupur Chaudhuri, Texas Southern University

Over a career of more than four decades, Dr. Nupur Chaudhuri has distinguished herself as a ground-breaking historian of Global History, British Imperialism and the history of the Indian subcontinent. Dr. Chaudhuri’s work has not so much focused on women’s history as studied history through women—and in so doing, blazed a trail for all historians who seek to offer readers and students a balanced perspective on the world’s events, in research and in the classroom. Dr. Chaudhuri is the author of over forty articles and reviews, spanning such diverse topics as women in Bengali society; Feminism in Eighteenth-Century France; and domestic culture in twentieth-century Kansas. She is also the co-author/editor of four books: Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (University of Illinois Press, 2010), with Sherry Katz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, which was awarded the Barbara Kanner Award by the Western Association of Women’s Historians; Voices of Women Historians: Personal, Professional and Political (Indiana University Press, 1999), with co Fuchs award recipient Dr. Eileen Boris; Nation, Empire, Colony: Critical Categories of Gender and Race Analysis (Indiana University Press, 1998) with Ruth Roach Pierson; and Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Indiana University Press, 1992) with Margaret Strobel.

As an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous women’s history journals (Gender and History; The Women’s History Review; The National Women’s Studies Journal; Victorian Studies); grant agencies, and book prize committees, Dr. Chaudhuri has helped countless historians—fledgling and established—develop, refine, and disseminate their research. As President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History from 1995- 1998 and President of the Western Association of Women Historians from 2003-2005, she has been a leader and role model for a new generation of women’s historians committed to preserving the CCWH’s traditions of scholarly support. It is with gratitude for her leadership and years of selfless service that Dr. Chaudhuri has been chosen to share the inaugural Rachel Fuchs Award with her colleague, Dr. Eileen Boris.