Spiegel Takes the Stage as President of the American Historical Association
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“What makes it especially poignant and rewarding is the fact that I initially went to school in America without speaking English. I think it says something quite marvelous about America, and America’s educational system, that someone like me could be elected president of the American Historical Association.” — Gabrielle Spiegel |
On Jan. 3, 2009, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor Gabrielle Spiegel PhD ’74 will ascend the steps to the stage in the east ballroom of the Hilton New York hotel, stand before a crowd of about 500 colleagues, and take her place in history.
The speech is the culminating event of Spiegel’s year-long tenure as president of the American Historical Association—with more than 14,000 members, the largest historical society in the United States—and the culmination of her remarkable career.
This is Spiegel’s big opportunity to weigh in on what she considers the pressing issues facing historians today, her chance to make the case as to why the medieval historiography and contemporary theory she’s pursued for the last 35 years matter, why her scholarship is important.
“It’s a very significant moment,” says Teofilo F. Ruiz, a medieval historian at the University of California at Los Angeles who is the vice president for the research division of the AHA. “This speech is the summation of her scholarship, something that grows from her work, and yet is has to be new. It’s a statement as to where she stands methodologically and historiographically. It’s a form of intellectual legacy.”
There, in front of the group that saw fit to recognize her as the best medieval historian of her generation by electing her its president, she has the floor. And because Spiegel’s presidential address will be printed in the February 2009 issue of the AHA’s journal, American Historical Review, her words won’t be forgotten. “This is probably the essay by you that will be read by more people outside the field than any other,” says historian David Bell, dean of faculty of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and an Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. “It’s a big deal.”
On that evening, after AHA president-elect Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University has finished her introduction, Spiegel will take her place behind the lectern. As she waits for the applause to cease, she’ll look out at the expectant faces of her fellow historians sitting before her and take a deep breath.
“Oh my God,” she’ll think. “Why did I agree to do this?”
In delivering the speech, Spiegel follows in the grand tradition of leadership by Johns Hopkins historians in the AHA. In 1884, Hopkins faculty members Herbert Baxter Adams and John Franklin Jameson founded the AHA, and other past presidents included Hopkins’ Frederic C. Lane and Philip D. Curtin, as well as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1886.
