NEWSLETTER
Society for the History of Children and Youth
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No. 12 |
Summer 2008 |
News from the Field, I Member News Compiled by Nancy Zey, Sam Houston State University Attention graduate students—you have a new representative in the SHCY, who shares the following message: “My name is Jessica Nelson, and I was recently elected as the new Graduate Student Member on the Executive Committee. I am a 3rd year doctoral student at Purdue University. If you have any questions, concerns, and/or comments about the SHCY and the upcoming conference please feel free to email me at jessjnelson@hotmail.com and I will do my best to assist you and work on your behalf.” James Marten (Marquette University) has begun his second term as chair of the Department of History at Marquette University. He was also appointed by the governor to the Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (in his other life, Jim is a historian of the Civil War era). The next volume of his anthology series at NYU Press, Children and Youth in a New Nation, will appear late in 2008. Harvey Graff (Ohio State University) is beginning a major research project on the social
history of interdisciplinarity as he continues to direct the LiteracyStudies@OSU
campus-wide interdisciplinary initiative (http://literacystudies.osu.edu/). Congratulations to Diana Selig on her recent promotion to associate professor with tenure in the history department at Claremont McKenna College. Paula Fass (University of California, Berkeley) will be Kerstin Hesselgren Professor in the Child Studies Department at Linkoping University in Sweden during the Fall 2008. Nancy Zey will begin a new position as an assistant professor in the Department of History at Sam Houston State University. Elena Jackson Albarrán recently completed and submitted her dissertation at the University of Arizona, entitled "Children of the Revolution: Constructing the Mexican Citizen, 1920-1940," in which she examines the dual process of construction and reception of children's popular culture for the generation growing up in the decades following the Mexican Revolution. And from July 19-24, she co-coordinated a symposium along with Susana Sosenski from the Colegio de Mexico for the 53rd Annual International Conference of Americanists in Mexico City about Latin American childhood. The title of the symposium was "Between Representation and Social Action: Childhood in Latin America, Past and Present." This fall, she starts a new position as Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and History at Miami University. Kudos to Richard Ivan Jobs (Pacific University). His book Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford University Press, 2007) was awarded the 2007 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine.Abigail A. Van Slyck (Connecticut College) has also received a book award. A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960 recently won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. For more information, visit: http://www.vafweb.org/awards/cummings.html and http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/V/vanslyck_manufactured.html. And The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 – 1050 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) by Cynthia Comacchio (Wilfrid Laurier University) received an Honourable Mention for the John A. Macdonald Prize, 2007, awarded to the best book in Canadian history published that year. Dirk Schumann, Professor of History at Jacobs University, Bremen, has accepted the position of Christian-Gottlob-Heyne Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Göttingen and will start teaching there in October 2008. He has most recently co-edited (with Paul Betts and Alon Confino) Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). E. Wayne Carp has authored "Does Opening Adoption Records Have an Adverse Social Impact? Some Lessons from the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia, 1953-2007" in Adoption Quarterly, Vol. 10.3-4, (2007): 29-52. Congrats to Emily D. Cahan who has been promoted to Professor of Psychology in the Department of Human Development at Wheelock College. To help foster research and professional connections, the SHCY invites new members to introduce themselves. A warm welcome to the following: Heidi Morrison (University of California at Santa Barbara): “I am presently completing my dissertation on the changing concept of childhood in Egypt from 1900-1950. My research is based on Arabic children's literature, intellectual discourse, and autobiographies of childhood that I collected during two years of research in the Egyptian national archives and libraries. I am very excited to be an historian of childhood in a non-western region and am especially challenged by the dearth in research on children's history in the Middle East.” To contact Heidi, please email morrisonheidi@hotmail.com. Roland Spickermann, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin (UTPB) in Odessa, Texas: “My current research concerns the history of adoption in Germany in the 20th century. I naturally would welcome hearing from others about either the history of adoption generally, or about SHCY issues regarding Germany.” Please contact Roland at spickermann_r@utpb.edu. Sarah A. Lichtman: “I am an assistant professor or design history at Parsons The New School in New York. I am working on my PhD at the Bard Graduate Center that looks at the spaces and material culture of youth during the Cold War. The title of my dissertation is: ‘From Basement to Bandstand: The Private and Public Places of the American Teenager, 1945-1965.’ To contact Sarah, please email lichtmas@newschool.edu. Julie Miller (Hunter College) announces the recent publication of Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (New York University Press): http://nyupress.org/abandoned.html. Laura Leibman (Reed College) has edited the upcoming Indian Converts (University of Massachusetts Press), which contains a chapter of biographies of Algonquian children from the colonial era and substantial information in the introduction on childhood in colonial New England. For more information on the book, see http://www.umass.edu/umpress/spr_08/leibman.htm. There will also be an archive of materials accompanying the book. The website is not active yet, but the URL will be http://academic.reed.edu/indianconverts/ Cynthia Comacchio (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Janet Golden (Rutgers-Camden) announce their upcoming book (co-edited with George Weisz): Healing the World's Children: Child Health in Interdisciplinary and International Perspective (McGill Queen's University Press). Diana Selig (Claremont McKenna College) has a new book out. Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement was just published by Harvard University Press. The book traces the rise and fall of intercultural education in the United States from the 1920s to the 1940s, demonstrating how new social science thinking about childhood precipitated efforts to overcome racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices. During this period liberal activists celebrated the "cultural gifts" that immigrant and minority groups brought to American life. They sought to reach young people in order to enhance democratic citizenship, enrich American institutions, and revitalize a shared culture. Harvey Graff (Ohio State University) has several new publications coming out:
Conferences, Presentations, and Other Upcoming Events Lucia Hodgson (University of Southern California) announces two upcoming conference panels related to the study of childhood:
At the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies annual conference, there will be a series of three panels, entitled Rocking the Bloc: Rock Music and Youth Identities in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The AAASS meeting will be in Philadelphia, November 20-23: for more information, see http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass/ © Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2008 |