As the end to her long and distinguished career at the University of Iowa approaches, professor Linda Kerber has a better word for retirement.

“I prefer to say ‘liberation,’ since I expect to continue to be a historian so long as my brain and eyesight hold out,” Kerber said last week in a lecture to UI’s Graduate History Society. “It’s the formal academic structures in which I’ve been embedded — structures that I admire, structures that I sought, structures that I have always considered myself lucky to have been part of — from which I retire.”

Kerber, the first woman to hold a chaired professorship at UI and one of the nation’s preeminent scholars in women’s history, will step away from classroom at the end of academic year after four decades of teaching in Iowa City. Before bidding farewell, however, she will be honored April 3 with a Distinguished Achievement Award at UI’s annual Celebration of Excellence and Achievement Among Women....