University of New Mexico History Professor Virginia Scharff has been elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians (SAH), an organization founded in 1939 by Allan Nevins and others to promote good historical writing. Membership is limited to 250 fellows, and Scharff was one of 13 elected this year.
The notification letter said in recognition of the literary and scholarly distinction of [her] historical work.
Scharff's published works includes,"Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age", Collier Macmillian Canada, 1991; "Coming of Age: America in the Twentieth Century", Houghton Mifflin, 1998; "Seeing Nature Through Gender", University of Kansas, 2003; and "Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West", University of California Press, 2003.
Past SAH presidents include Nevins, Barbara Tuchman, and David McCullough, and current board members include Frances FitzGerald, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Richard White and Elliott West.
Mary Jane Slaughter, chair, Department of History said, "Virginia's election into this elite group of historians brings national recognition to our department and increases our stature. She is deserving of this honor. Her publications are outstanding."
Scharff's teaching focuses on the history of women in the United States and the American West, environmental history, social theory and writing as a historian. She was the Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Research Fellow at the Howard R. Lamar Center at Yale University, and she directs UNM's Center for the Southwest, which sponsors programs and events to bring together scholars and the public to promote understanding of Southwestern history, culture, landscape and environment.
Scharff has served as consultant on numerous television documentary projects, including the nationally broadcast Biography of America, a television course in United States history produced by WGBH in Boston, and funded by Annenberg CPB.
She also enjoys a career as a mystery novelist. Under the pseudonym Virginia Swift, she has published two books:"Bad Company"; (2002) and "Brown-Eyed Girl&" (2000).
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales (505) 277-5920
Posted by kwentworth at April 21, 2004 10:55 AM