Cynthia Enloe, Research Professor at Clark University’s Department of International Development, Community, and Environment, has been awarded the Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement in Peace Studies Award, by the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA).
“The award honors a very select group of scholar-activists who have made truly significant and ground breaking contributions that affect scholars across disciplines,” IDCE Director William Fisher noted. The selection committee noted that Enloe’s work in the areas of gender studies, feminist analysis, and international politics is widely known and used in peace studies circles to link those subjects with thoroughgoing critique of militarism and war, Fisher added.
Enloe will accept her award and deliver a keynote address at the PJSA North America 8th Annual Conference, Oct. 1-2, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The title of her address is “What Happens to Women After Wars: How the End of One War Plants the Seed for the Next.”
“I really feel honored,” Enloe said. “Clark’s Peace Studies program and dedicated founder, Joe de Rivera [Clark professor of Psychology], are among the pioneers in U.S. universities.”
The most recent of Enloe’s many books is “Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War” (University of California Press 2010). Others include: “Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics” (2000), “Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives” (2004), and “Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link” (2007).
Enloe’s career has included Fulbright fellowships in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Britain and Canada, as well as lecturing in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Korea, Turkey and at universities around the United States. Her books and articles have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German. She has written for Ms. Magazine and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC.
At Clark, Professor Enloe has been selected “Outstanding Teacher” three times and named University Senior Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship. In 2009, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of London’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies.
Enloe’s feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s labor is made cheap in globalized factories and how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support government war-waging policies—and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies.
The non-profit organization PJSA is the North-American affiliate of the International Peace Research Association.
The man for whom the award is named is the late Howard Zinn (1922-2010), historian, author playwright, and social activist. Among his books is the best-selling “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn also wrote extensively about the civil rights, civil liberties and anti-war movements.
Since its founding in 1887, Clark University in Worcester, Mass., has a history of challenging convention. As an innovative liberal arts college and research university, Clark’s world-class faculty lead a community of creative thinkers and passionate doers and offer a range of expertise, particularly in the areas of psychology, geography, urban education, Holocaust and genocide studies, environmental studies, and international development and social change. Clark’s students, faculty and alumni embody the Clark motto: Challenge convention. Change our world.
