Historian Prof. Guy Beiner, from BGU's Dept. of General History, continues to reap impressive accomplishments and receive international recognition in his field. His last book, Forgetful Remembrance Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press), has just been awarded the 2020 Wayland D. Hand Prize. The prize is awarded biannually by the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society (AFS) for the best book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials.
In the book, Beiner examines a wide range of unconventional historical sources, including oral traditions passed down over generations, to reveal how unionist Protestant communities in the Northern Irish province of Ulster, who take pride in their loyalism to the United Kingdom, attempted over more than two centuries to suppress troubling memories of their participation alongside Catholics in a republican rebellion against the British Crown.
The book has already won numerous international awards, including the 2019 George L. Mosse Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association for 'an outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity, and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since 1500'; the 2019 Katharine Briggs Award, presented by the Folklore Society (UK) for the 'most distinguished contribution to folklore studies'; the Irish Historical Research Prize 2019 awarded biannually by the National University of Ireland for the best new work on Irish history written by a senior researcher; and it also received an honorable mention for the 2018 James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies for Books in History and Social Sciences . In addition, the book has been shortlisted for the 2020 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, which recognizes exceptional works that promote reconciliation and greater understanding between the peoples of Britain and Ireland, in memory of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, British Ambassador to Ireland who was assassinated by the IRA in 1976.
This is the second time that Prof. Beiner has been awarded the Wayland D. Hand Prize, an unprecedented achievement. His book, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press), received the award in 2008. While the earlier book focused on social memory (how communities remember significant historical events), the present book develops a new research field of social forgetting (how communities cope with the legacy of embarrassing events in their past).
Beiner specializes in remembering and forgetting in modern history. His next book, due to be published by Oxford University Press, is a collection of essays on remembering, forgetting and rediscovering the Great Influenza pandemic ('Spanish' flu) of 1918 to 1919. This book is the outcome of research sponsored by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and international collaboration funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
An interview (in Hebrew) with Prof. Beiner about the flu pandemic, which killed over 50 million people just over a hundred years ago, featured in the last issue of 'Aleph, Bet, Gimmel', the University's Hebrew newspaper: https://in.bgu.ac.il/Pages/gbeiner-corona.aspx
