Honorary doctorate to Mary Nash, professor of Contemporary History
UB Emeritus Professor Mary Nash was granted the Honorary Doctorate by Universitat Rovira i Virgili on Friday, March 9. “I am shocked by the paradox between the legal progresses in womenʼsʼ rights and the persistence of discriminatory practices, vexatious attitudes, harassment, sexual abuse, and gender violence”, said the historian during her speech in the ceremony. The URV professor of Contemporary History, Monsterrat Duch, was Nashʼs patron.
UB Emeritus Professor Mary Nash was granted the Honorary Doctorate by Universitat Rovira i Virgili on Friday, March 9. “I am shocked by the paradox between the legal progresses in womenʼsʼ rights and the persistence of discriminatory practices, vexatious attitudes, harassment, sexual abuse, and gender violence”, said the historian during her speech in the ceremony. The URV professor of Contemporary History, Monsterrat Duch, was Nashʼs patron.
“Detecting and analysing the historical functioning of inequalities is the work of academic historiography and feminism -said the professor- because it is an effective tool to identify the different layers of the historical construction of persisting inequalities, just like the logics that account for the continuity of the pay gap, policies, social and cultural gaps”.
In her speech, Mary Nash remembered the strong rejection -during the first decades of her studies- to the idea of history of women, which she had already created, and to the academic legitimacy as an object of historical studies. Many distinguished historians, even the progressive ones, supported a historiographical canon that regarded male as the universal rule and left women aside history.
Born in Ireland in 1947, Mary Nash studied at the universities of Cork, Turin and Barcelona, and has been professor of Contemporary History at the UB from 1991 to 2018. When she came to Catalonia in 1968, during the Franco regime, she became interested in the outstanding role of women in the 2nd Republic and during the Spanish Civil War, which was the topic of her thesis, and since then, history of women became the cause of her professional life. In the early seventies, she started the course on history of women in the UB, the first teaching institution in Spain to add this subject.