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Assistant Professor of History Penelope Ismay, who researches the social history of modernity in Britain, has been named the Cooney Family Assistant Professor.
Her first academic year at Boston College just completed, Ismay is the latest faculty member to be appointed to an endowed assistant professorship as part of a new initiative to support junior faculty research and early-career development. She joins Buehler Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor David Miele of the Lynch School of Education, White Family Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of Political Science Jennifer Erickson and Donohue Assistant Professor in Business Law Natalya Shnitser, whose appointments were announced earlier this year.
The new assistant professorship was made possible through a gift by University Trustee Robert J. Cooney ’74, partner in the Chicago law firm Cooney & Conway, and family.
“I am very honored and humbled to be the inaugural holder of this professorship,” said Ismay, who came to BC after serving as a visiting scholar at the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “At a time when many institutions are foregoing long-term investments in people, Boston College is going the other way. The University’s commitment to the humanities and support for junior faculty is incredibly clear and strong.
“I’m also deeply grateful to the Cooney family for its generosity. I have no doubt that their gift will change my career. But, in a larger sense, it is another signal that the liberal arts are highly valued at Boston College.”
"Penny Ismay is just the kind of talented young scholar we intended to support with this gift,” said Cooney, a trustee since 2010 who serves on the board’s Committee on Mission and Character. “We look forward to seeing her scholarship develop and we're excited about the impact we know she'll make on her students."
Cooney also has been a member of his graduating class’ 35th and 40th Reunion Gift committees, the Law School Dean’s Advisory Board, and – along with his wife, Loretta – the Chicago Regional Campaign Committee. The Cooneys have two alumni children, Ellen ’08 and Michael ’10, JD’14.
Ismay holds master’s and doctoral degrees from UCal-Berkeley, and her academic and professional honors include a Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, an Institute of European Studies Dissertation Fellowship, and an Anglo-American Fellowship at Pembroke College in Cambridge, England. This past semester, she taught The Secret History of the Economy in Britain, 1600-1900.
“Penny Ismay has been a brilliant addition to the History Department, building on our longstanding strength in British history,” said Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley, a colleague of Ismay in the History Department. “Her research on the social and cultural history of early-modern Europe is wonderfully original, and her teaching is already earning rave reviews from our undergraduates.”
Ismay’s research centers on the advent of modern society in 18th and 19th century Europe, with a particular focus on Britain. The last few decades have seen historical scholarship shift to other, previously less-scrutinized areas of the world and Ismay feels the critiques emerging from this scholarship open up the possibility for a fresh perspective on British/European history as well.
“In the same way that old theories of modernity were blind to modern developments in other regions, these theories also gave us an unrealistic sense of how European societies navigated the major socio-economic, political and religious changes of the modern period,” she explained. “If modernity is characterized by the rise of the individual, the growth of industrialism and urban life, and an increasingly mobile population and so on, the question is: How does a society function when it is made up of individualistic strangers who are increasingly concentrated in urban centers?
“Because Britain was one of the leaders in this process, and arguably one of the more successful, asking new questions of its history is incredibly important.”
A recent study by Ismay examines the role of friendly or mutual assistance societies – viewed as precursors to modern insurance and the welfare state – in helping foster a sense of community, and shared responsibilities, in Britain during that transitional period.
“Historians have typically thought about friendly societies in terms of working-class formation, in response to elites withdrawing from the social obligations they practiced in an earlier age,” she said. “But these societies promoted two new types of relationships that were difficult in this modern era: relationships between new kinds of social classes and relationships between strangers. Reformers used friendly societies to think with, reconfiguring them such that each member contributed according to ability and received according to liability, for example.
“These ideas did not always work in practice, but the fact that they tried shows that reformers were looking for socially meaningful ways of integrating the poor into a rapidly changing British society.”
Ismay points to the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows as being particularly conscientious in affirming unity among its members through various rituals or practices, some of them adopted from religious ceremonies or other organizations, notably the Freemasons.
“It was a way of bringing together a pretty disparate group,” said Ismay, whose article, “Between Providence and Risk: Odd Fellows, Benevolence and the Social Limits of Actuarial Science, 1820s–1880s,” is forthcoming in the journal Past and Present; she also has a book in progress, Trust Among Strangers: A History of Friendly Societies in Britain. “If you were an Odd Fellow living in London, for instance, you could move north to Manchester and – because you knew the secret password and the ceremony – you would have a point of contact, a bed for the night, and access to job market information, whatever your social standing.”
The evolution of friendly societies, and their impact on Britain, was a gradual process, she noted. “There is a tendency, sometimes, to regard historical periods before the one you study as static. Conceptions of community are particularly susceptible to this kind of idealization. But it’s always a matter of trial and error; not everything that the Odd Fellows tried worked, and they had to revise and rethink their practices of solidarity as the world around them changed. But they kept fighting for their vision.
“If we agree that it’s possible to learn from history, then perhaps the Odd Fellows’ experience can offer an example. I’m not saying we need to reinstitute friendly societies per se; the point is, you find new ways to look at a situation. The myriad configurations of friendly societies that reformers experimented with in the early 19th century, and the novel ways in which working people adapted their practices of mutuality to fit a changing world, can give us new ways of thinking about contemporary problems of social welfare and cooperation.”
A native of Berkley, Mich., Ismay followed an unlikely path to academia. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history from the US Naval Academy, and was part of the first class of female graduates to serve in integrated naval operations aboard combat ships, spending five years at sea with two tours to the Persian Gulf as officer of the deck on a destroyer and an aircraft carrier.
“The transition to an academic career was very interesting,” said Ismay. “In the Navy, you over-train to completely master a task, so that it’s automatic; but the knowledge base involved is finite. In academia – and particularly the humanities – knowledge is infinite, and even as you try to master a discipline, you realize you have only scratched the surface.
“I’m very happy to be at BC, where there is tremendous collegiality, and to be part of a young, dynamic department where everyone’s doing interesting things. I love being in a place where the importance of history is understood and appreciated.”