Dr. Anya Zilberstein Wins 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women Historian’s Book Prize

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has chosen Dr. Zilberstein's book, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) as the winner of the 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women Historian’s Book Prize in the category "First book published by a woman normally resident in North America that that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality." 

In making the award, the Prize Committee praised Anya's book in the following terms: 

"Anya Zilberstein has written an astute book about intellectual debates in the north Atlantic regarding the historical significance of climate and its variability. Her path breaking analysis of how people understood climate change is pointedly linked to discussions about colonial expansion. A Temperate Empire offers an important corrective to current scholarship on climate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It demonstrates not only that northern climes were considered by Western European colonizers to be less-than-ideal, thereby puncturing stubborn myths about the supposedly healthier New England colonies (...) Part environmental history, part history of science, A Temperate Empire is incredibly timely, as it suggests that our own debates about climate change need to be historicized. In demonstrating the ways that climate figures not just as an inescapable scientific fact, but simultaneously as a discourse that is shaped and manipulated, this book makes a key intervention into our understanding of past and present climate change. The book’s vivid and witty prose also makes for admirably lucid reading."