Stern, Steve J. 1951–

(Steve Stern, Steve Jefferey Stern)

PERSONAL:

Born December 28, 1951, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Adel Stern; married Florencia Elizabeth Mallon (a historian); children: Ramon Joseph, Ralph Isaiah. Education: Cornell University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1973; Yale University, M.A., 1975, M.Phil., 1976, Ph.D., 1979.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, 3211 Humanities Bldg., 455 N. Park St., University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga, Ayacucho, Peru, visiting professor of historical-social sciences, 1977; University of Wisconsin—Madison, instructor, 1979, assistant professor, 1979-83, associate professor, 1983-88, professor of history, 1988-2006, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor, 2006—, director of Latin American and Iberian studies program, 1992-95, director of graduate studies in history, 1997-99, chair of history department, 2003-06, vice provost for faculty and staff, 2008—. Yale University, visiting assistant professor, 1982; Stanford University, fellow of Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1990-91.

MEMBER:

Latin American Studies Association (member of nominating committee, 1987-88), Conference on Latin American History, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Moses Coit Tyler Prize (cowinner) and Clyde A. Duniway Prize, both Cornell University, 1973; James A. Robertson Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 1982, for "The Rise and Fall of Indian-White Alliances: A Regional View of ‘Conquest’ History"; William Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award, 1983, W.F. Vilas Associateship, 1990-92, and John Leddy Phelan Distinguished Service Award, 1998, all University of Wisconsin—Madison; Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995 was named an outstanding title of 1999 by Choice; Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 was named a Top Ten Latin America Pick by History Book Club Review, 2004; Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2007, for Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988. Numerous fellowships and grants, including Danforth Foundation, 1973-78, Fulbright-Hays, 1976-77, 1984-85, and 1996-97, Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies, 1976-78 and 1996-97, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1981 and 1990-91, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1987-88, 1997, and 1999, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1991-92, and American Council of Learned Societies, 2006-07.

WRITINGS:

Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1982, 2nd edition, 1993.

(Editor and contributor) Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1987.

(With others, and author of introduction) Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1993.

The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1995.

(Editor and contributor) Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1998.

Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (first book in "The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile" trilogy), Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2004.

Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988 (second book in "The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile" trilogy), Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2006.

Also author of article "The Rise and Fall of Indian-White Alliances: A Regional View of ‘Conquest’ History," Hispanic American Historical Review, August, 1981. Contributor to books, including The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History, edited by George Collier and others, 1982; The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Orin Starn and others, 1995; and Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, 2001.

Contributor to periodicals, including Allpanchis, American Historical Review, Churmichasun, Ethnohistory, Hispanic American Historical Review, Histórica, Ideología, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Perspectives, New York Historical Society Quarterly, Princeton University Library Chronicle, Radical History Review, Revista Andina, Revista Latinoamericana de Historia Económica y Social, and Revista Mexicana de Sociología.

Latin American Perspectives, participating editor, 1982-2004, editor of special issue, winter, 1985; member of editorial boards of Hispanic American Historical Review, 1985-90, Ethnohistory, 1988-91, Social Science History, 1991-94, Latin American Research Review, 2000-03, and History and Memory, 2008—. Author's works have been translated into Spanish.

SIDELIGHTS:

Credited with making "an extraordinary impact on the field of Latin American history" by Sujay Rao in the Historian, Steve J. Stern is a longtime professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the author or editor of a number of works dealing with Latin American history from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. "He has made several significant contributions to Latin American subaltern studies," in the opinion of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor Paul Rich, who named both of Stern's first two books among those contributions. Stern has won awards for both his teaching and his writing.

Stern's 1995 book The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico "is not only scholarly but highly interesting," commented Rich in his H-Net Reviews critique. Based on extensive research into both federal and local legal archives, the book confronts stereotypes such as the victimized Mexican woman, explores whether there is in fact a sharp division between public and private spheres of life, and suggests that social history can convey important implications about power as well as patriarchy. Writing for the Journal of Women's History, Susan B. Whitney noted Stern's treatment of how women contested the prevailing power dynamics of gender, remarking that his stories of individual battles provide "some of the more captivating writing in an otherwise unnecessarily densely written work." Whitney voiced concerns about the accuracy of Stern's portrait of gender relations and the position of women but felt that he uses ideas about masculinity "to good effect." Rich remarked on the "prodigious" research behind the work and the "in-depth interpretation" Stern gives the source materials, which Rich found result in a "substantial, painstakingly documented, and well-written book" and "an important study of gender relationships among the marginalized in late colonial Mexico."

In 1998 Stern served as the editor of Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995, a collection of essays by fourteen scholars, of whom two-thirds were Peruvian. The volume seeks to understand events, people, and situations involved in the rise and fall of the violent leftist revolutionary movement known as Sendero Luminosa, or "Shining Path." According to John Crabtree in the Journal of Latin American Studies, the book is less a history of the movement than "an attempt to analyse the social configurations in different parts of Peru that help explain how such an apparently dogmatic, authoritarian and bloodthirsty organization took hold and came seriously to threaten the very existence of the Peruvian state." Christopher Allieri in the Journal of International Affairs claimed that the book leaves some questions unanswered, although he acknowledged that its "tight focus … allows the reader to understand the concepts set forth more easily." In the American Political Science Review, Cynthia McClintock called Shining and Other Paths "one of the most significant scholarly contributions to date about the Shining Path." Like Allieri, McClintock perceived gaps in the book's coverage, but she concluded, "Despite these shortcomings, Stern has collected a remarkable set of chapters that illuminate many key dimensions of the Shining Path's trajectory and effect." Describing the book as "the first serious attempt to provide a comprehensive interpretation," Crabtree deemed it "a major contribution to both the literature on peasant politics and on contemporary Peru."

Stern embarked on a trilogy focused on Chile with his 2004 book Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. It is "a thoughtful, nuanced study of how Chileans remember the traumatic 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet" over Marxist leader Salvador Allende, according to a Publishers Weekly critic. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Stern applies social and psychological theories of memory as well as ethnography and history to examine and interpret more than ninety conversations with people representing an assortment of perspectives. Brian Loveman in Latin American Politics and Society characterized the book as "at once a methodologically eclectic effort to theorize the construction and sustention of social memory … and an explicitly self-conscious and personal account by a Jewish child of Holocaust survivors … of coming to terms with radical evil." H-Net Reviews contributor Margaret M. Power drew attention to Stern's interviewing skills, "valuable insights," and the originality of his exploration of memory; she regarded Remembering Pinochet's Chile as "an innovative and thoughtful theoretical discussion of memory" and "a pathbreaking book." By providing commentary and reflection on the interviews, observed Alfredo Riquelme in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Stern "links his careful examination of the Chilean experience with a historical and ethical reflection of global scope." Richard R. Super, writing in the International Third World Studies Journal and Review, described the work as "meticulously researched, creatively organized, and engagingly written." Distinguishing it from other current studies of Chile, Super stated that Stern's book "breaks new ground in its insights about a Chilean present that is looking back in order to map its future."

Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988 is the second book in Stern's Chilean trilogy. While the first book dealt with the several years before Pinochet's 1998 arrest for crimes against humanity (some time after an elected president took his place in 1990), the second focuses directly on the years of Pinochet's dictatorship. Elizabeth Quay Hutchison in the American Historical Review remarked that Battling for Hearts and Minds "builds on the strengths" of its predecessor and is "a penetrating history of the dictatorship." As in the first book, Stern employs concepts of emblematic memory categorized in four groups: memory as salvation, as rupture, as persecution and awakening, and as a closed box. He traces the development of the different types of memory through the years of Pinochet's regime, showing how pro- and anti-Pinochet groups manipulated memory to achieve their objectives, and examines what he calls "memory knots," or particularly meaningful moments. Rao felt that Stern was "at his best" relating stories of individuals and expressed regret that the book offers "less of the analysis at which Stern excels," but he maintained that the book is nonetheless "an impressive accomplishment by one of today's most influential historians of Latin America." Writing in A Contracorriente, Michael J. Lazzara explained that Stern's book "affords readers more than a simple factual rendering of what happened in Chile; it allows them an understanding of the very emergence of memory as a culturally significant and politically contested concept." Calling the book "elegant and accessible," Lazzara concluded that Battling for Hearts and Minds "is likely to remain, for many years to come, a central reference text on the Pinochet regime and its ensuing battles to define historical memory."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

A Contracorriente, fall, 2007, Michael J. Lazzara, "Memory Scripts in the Making: Chile's 9/11 and the Struggle for Meaning," pp. 243-252.

American Historical Review, October, 2007, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, review of Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988.

American Political Science Review, June, 1999, Cynthia McClintock, review of Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995, p. 473.

Americas, April, 2006, Katherine Hite, review of Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998; July, 2007, Michael J. Lazzara, review of Battling for Hearts and Minds.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, April, 2008, Cath Collins, review of Battling for Hearts and Minds, pp. 287-288.

Historian, spring, 2008, Sujay Rao, review of Battling for Hearts and Minds, p. 127.

International Third World Studies Journal and Review, Volume XVI, 2005, Richard R. Super, review of Remembering Pinochet's Chile.

Journal of African History, August, 1994, review of Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, p. 528.

Journal of International Affairs, spring, 1999, Christopher Allieri, review of Shining and Other Paths, p. 831.

Journal of Latin American Studies, May, 2000, John Crabtree, review of Shining and Other Paths, p. 585; February, 2007, Alfredo Riquelme, review of Remembering Pinochet's Chile, p. 213.

Journal of Political Ecology, Volume 4, 1997, Richard K. Reed, review of Confronting Historical Paradigms.

Journal of Third World Studies, fall, 2006, Michael R. Hall, review of Remembering Pinochet's Chile.

Journal of Women's History, spring, 1999, Susan B. Whitney, review of The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico, p. 193.

Latin American Politics and Society, summer, 2006, Brian Loveman, review of Remembering Pinochet's Chile, p. 198.

Left History, fall-winter, 2007, Alexander Wilde, review of Battling for Hearts and Minds.

Publishers Weekly, June 7, 2004, review of Remembering Pinochet's Chile, p. 40.

ONLINE

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (April, 1996), Paul Rich, "Contested Patriarchal Pacts in Old Regime Mexico: Revising the Canon of Gender"; (October, 2005), Margaret M. Power, "Remembering Chile's Victims of Yesterday and Today."

University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History Web site,http://history.wisc.edu/ (September 22, 2008), faculty profile.