Robin has written a moving and fitting tribute to a major contributor to the fields of alcohol studies and cultural history.  I remember meeting her only once, at the very important 1984 conference but was impressed by  her grace, humour, hospitality and cosmopolitanism. Her work on the 1991 volume gave critical impetus to the field of the social history of alcohol. 

Ian Tyrrell

________________________________________
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robin G W Room [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, 29 October 2010 6:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Susanna Barrows remembered

    I got the news this morning that Susanna Barrows has died.  It hit me hard.
    I happen to be in Paris, by myself for a couple of days.  I decided the best tribute I could think of was to go to the “France 1500” exhibition at the Grand-Palais, a luminous show about France at the junction between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
     It was a great show, but it was not as Susanna would have organized it.  The material of the show was the art and books and furniture of the nobility, beautiful and grand and sometimes revealing about their lives, and certainly informative about historical currents and influences. Susanna’s France in 1500 would have been about how peasants and townspeople lived, how they laughed and danced and ate and loved and fought.  And, of course, how they drank.
    To me, Susanna was a historian of drinking, and all that goes along with it. Whereas for her own scholarly tribe, the historians, the alcohol was incidental; she was a historian of mentalities, or culture, or a social historian, who had found a rich new trove in the French archives in the records of what went on in the French cafés and their predecessors turned in to the French state by police and informers.
     I met Susanna first at what turned out to be her hiring lecture for the History Department at UC Berkeley.  Three of us from the Alcohol Research Group had noticed that the History Department was sponsoring this lecture about alcohol in France by a visiting professor, and decided to go.  Susanna later told me that she wondered who the three faces in the front row were, smiling and bobbing enthusiastically. She opened the talk with a picture of a bill from when she had been in hospital in France, to illustrate the difference in French and American mentality on wine.  As a matter of course, the French hospital had served wine with the dinners for in-patients; but her American health insurer had a category in the bill labeled “extra wine”, which they declined to pay.  The talk went on from there to open a window for us on the ideas and social history around wine in France, particularly in the 19th century – a look into the past vividly illustrated with slides of caricatures by Daumier, of impressionist and later paintings of drinkers and drinking places.
    She got the job.  And so began a new chapter in Susanna’s main vocation, as teacher and mentor to a multitude of doctoral students in history.  “Teacher and mentor” doesn’t really convey how important she was to a generation and more or historians who got their start in Susanna’s courses and seminars.  The testimony of a few of them can be read in the Friends of Cal History Newsletter for Summer, 2008 (http://history.berkeley.edu/newsletter/2008_Summer/barrows.html), when the UC Berkeley Graduate Division awarded her the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award.  As that article notes, one of her former students pointed out that “All but one of the twenty-seven or so theses [she] directed have become university press books.” And those books have put “what the French call ‘l’usine Barrows’ (the Barrows factory) at the forefront of the field…. In short, Susanna Barrows is the major graduate teacher of her generation in modern French history.”
    The article also notes that the dissertations Susanna directed had little relationship with one another.  Her genius was to help each student to develop his or her own interest.  So there have been only a relatively few students over the years which have picked up her interest in matters relating to alcohol.   In this respect, those of us connected through her alcohol side only every now and then had to share her with the historians.  Although when those connections did happen – I remember an uproarious excursion from Paris for an afternoon-long lunch at an Orléans restaurant with two Michelin stars – it was clear that Susanna was a central figure in the overlapping circles of American historians of France and, indeed, Europe.  She was loved, but also respected – she had clearly paid her dues in the French archives, keeping a list, for instance, of when each of the departmental archives was closed for summer vacation.
    The biggest work connection which Susanna and I had came when, under her influence, the Berkeley Alcohol Research Group hosted an international conference on the social history of alcohol in 1984.  Funding for the conference came from NIAAA, which in those days had a broader view of its duties to scholarship than at some later times.  The conference had a mixture of social historians and social scientists interested in history; as I remember, the proceedings (in the first reference below) included some interesting comments on each others’ habits from the two tribes.  It became the first of a series of alcohol and drug history conferences which continues today, most recently in Glasgow (http://historyofalcoholanddrugs.typepad.com/alcohol_and_drugs_history/conferences/)  While a number of other papers from the Berkeley conference were published in Contemporary Drug Problems, those which fitted in a social history frame were collected in a book Susanna and I edited (the second reference below).  Included in the book was her wonderful paper, using archival materials, on 19th-century Parisian cafés as “the parliament of the people”.
     The Susanna I knew was full of life and joy.  She loved France and the French, and particularly her first love, Paris.  But it was a love that could be critical, or at least was open to teasing.  She treasured the details of life, of how people differed in how they lived, of what translated and what did not translate between cultures.  She was always ready to follow an intellectual trail, often with fruitful results.
     The world is less without her.
           Robin

Susanna Barrows, Robin Room and Jeffrey Verhey, eds. (1987) The Social History of Alcohol:  Drinking and Culture in Modern Society.  Berkeley:  Alcohol Research Group.
Susanna Barrows and Robin Room, eds. (1991) Drinking:  Behavior and Belief Systems in Modern History.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.