Cal Poly History Professor Honored by Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

Molly Loberg spent a quarter in Berlin, in 2012, conducting research.

Cal Poly History Professor Molly J. Loberg was awarded the History Article Prize by The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the oldest and largest association for female historians in the country, for her publication “The Streetscape of Economic Crisis: Commerce, Politics and Urban Space in Interwar Berlin.”

The prize recognizes the best article published in any historical field by a woman who is normally a resident of North America. Recipients are awarded an honorarium of $500 and a one-year complimentary membership. Loberg’s article appeared in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Modern History and was chosen from a pool of more than 100 nominations.

Loberg, whose area of expertise is modern European history, centers her article on the perspectives and uses of the city streets of Berlin during the 1920s and ’30s. She discusses how the city landscape translated and revealed the struggle of the political and economic crises of the period.

By using different types of research tools, including police reports, photographs, newspaper articles and archives, Loberg demonstrates how the interwar crises can be tracked in the streets of Berlin. She shows how the cityscape not only revealed social, political and economic tensions but also how governments manipulated the city to portray an image of what Germany “should be.”

Founded in 1930 by Louise Fargo Brown, The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians was established to help build a place and advance the cause for women in the history profession.