[Senate] Passing of Kenneth Barkin, Professor Emeritus in History

[Cherysa P Cortez]

Dear colleagues,

On December 23, 2022, Kenneth Barkin, Professor Emeritus in History, passed away peacefully, with his wife, Elizabeth Lord, Professor Emerita in Botany and Plant Sciences, by his side. Betty has asked that in lieu of flowers that colleagues might send personnel remembrances of Ken to her (elizabethmarylord at gmail.com<mailto:elizabethmarylord at gmail.com>) to be shared with family.

Following is a tribute from Piotr Gorecki in the History Department:

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of our colleague Kenneth Barkin, Professor Emeritus in the History Department, on December 23, 2022, after a long illness. Ken has served on our faculty from 1968 until his retirement in 2005, and thereafter remained active in scholarship, and in civic and cultural engagement. Over his long decades in the department, he has exemplified an engaged, distinguished professionalism, spanning research, teaching, and service. His specialty was modern German history between its unification under Bismarck and the Weimar Republic, above all the several decades on either side of 1900. He pursued a highly innovative brand of cultural history, seamlessly linking society, economy, and ideas. In the course of this work, he turned that inquiry toward individual biography, intercultural contact, the United States, and race: the place of Blacks (above all Black Americans) in the culture and learning of fin-de-siècle Germany, as exemplified through the experience, writings, and thought of W.E.B. DuBois. In 1991, he assumed the editorship of Central European History, and promptly reestablished that journal as the top venue of scholarship in English on the history of German-speaking countries, until passing on this position in 2004. He served as department chair at the turn of the 1980s and the 1990s, a time of rapid acceleration in the hiring of new colleagues across UCR, and he was especially welcoming and supportive toward new junior colleagues. Assiduously involved in all areas of teaching, he supervised several doctoral students. His interest in culture broadly conceived, blended seamlessly with an esthetic and material sensibility-as reflected in his teaching and dissertation supervision relating to modern European material culture, and in his curating, and personally gathering, magnificent collections of pewter, produced and circulated in the region and time comprising his terrain of research. He layered these activities with occasional commentary in non-academic venues on important issues of today, with emphasis on social and economic inequality. We remember Ken with great admiration as a colleague of broad and deep learning and range of interests and talents, and as a person marked by an abiding sense of humanity and social justice, great strength, principled conviction, and integrity.

Please join me in our remembrance and celebration of Ken's legacy. We are honored to count him among the most renowned of our community.

In your service,
Sang-Hee
__________________________
Cherysa Cortez
Executive Director, Academic Senate
University Office Building 221
951.827.6154|   cherysac at ucr.edu<mailto:cherysac at ucr.edu>
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE
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