About the lecture

Among the many reasons that individuals write autobiographies is the urge to set forth both their individuality and their typicality. The we/I conundrum unconsciously shaping the self-narrative of philosopher, theologian and saint Edith Stein’s remarkable work, Life in a Jewish Family, 1891-1916: An Autobiography, offers us a valuable entry to a fundamental motif in countless first person documents. As an early twentieth-century phenomenologist, Stein grappled with the classic issues of essence, type and individual. These appear in fascinating and complex ways in her life account. 

Scholars retrospectively analyze an autobiographical text for what they reveal about a person’s experience and thought as representative (or not) of significant populations within a given time and place. Stein is not unusual in her claim that she and her family are typical, as when her “Forward” declares that her family exemplifies German Jewish people of her times. She insists on this typicality to justify her writing at a time of rampant antisemitism. And, yet, she is no less eager to display the myriad ways in which she and certain Stein family members are  singular. Since this we/I tension also appears in her philosophical treatises, I plan to correlate her statements in her autobiography with her philosophical treatment of identity, women, and ethnicity in its individual and community experience.

About the Speaker

Joyce Berkman is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Massachusetts where she taught from 1965-2014, teaching as well at Mount Holyoke College, and in Canada and Germany, earning the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award, its Distinguished Academic Outreach Award and a US Fulbright, among other awards. She was a founding member of the University and Five College Women’s Studies programs and launched courses at the University and in the Five Colleges on US, British, and European women’s history, African American women’s history, as well as seminars in the history of reproductive rights, oral history, autobiography, history and fiction.  Her published scholarship spans multiple disciplines, including philosophy and theology, and issues in historical theory and methodology. Book-length works include: Olive Schreiner: Feminism on the Frontier, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism, Edith Stein’s Life in a Jewish Family, and Contemplating Edith Stein, her edited volume that includes three of her essays. Her leading secondary interest is in music theory, composition and piano performance.