History Book Club Presents What Use are Historians?
Why do grassroots activists need historians? And why do historians need to collaborate with grassroots activists? Alum Nikki Berg Burin (PhD ‘07) will describe how her work as a historian has been transformed by her return to her home state of North Dakota, which has been roiling from a set of intertwined crises triggered by the oil boom. She has embraced a community-centered research agenda around the history of sexual violence and exploitation in North Dakota. Burin will be in conversation with Kirsten Delegard, one of the co-founders of Mapping Prejudice at the University of Minnesota. North Dakota provides a microcosm of the collective challenges facing all Americans in this moment of crisis. The two public historians will discuss how their research and teaching has been transformed by their awareness of urgent community needs and why it is important to bring a historical perspective into their collaboration with contemporary grassroots activists.
About the Hosts
Nikki Berg Burin
Nikki Berg Burin (PhD '07, history) has been a full-time faculty member at UND since 2012. She has a shared appointment between the Department of History and American Indian Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Program. Dr. Berg Burin serves as the WGS undergraduate advisor and faculty advisor for UND's feminist student organization The F Word. She also teaches in the UND Honors Program and serves on the governing council of the Northern Great Plains History Conference.
She regularly teaches introductory survey courses in American history and women's studies, as well as courses on American women's history and the history of North Dakota. These courses correlate with her current research, which focuses on the history of sexual violence and exploitation in North Dakota.
Kirsten Delegard
Kirsten Delegard is one of the co-founders of the Mapping Prejudice Project. A third-generation Minneapolitan, she trained originally as a women's historian and explored the history of women and politics in her early research. More recently she has devoted her energy to public history and unearthing the complex past of her hometown. This focus led to Mapping Prejudice and the Historyapolis Project, which Delegard also founded.
In addition to her appointment in the libraries, she holds faculty affiliations with the Department of Geography, Environment and Society and the Heritage Studies and Public History Program.