Bringing Up the World's Boys and Girls: American Efforts to Save Children Overseas, 1945-1979
300 E. 34th Street, Apartment 23G
New York, NY 10016
Joanne Meyerowitz, George Chauncey, Jenifer Van Vleck
My dissertation explores American efforts to assist children overseas during the Cold War era. It examines how American-led international child welfare agencies supported larger U.S. efforts to guide the trajectory of development abroad, first in postwar Europe and then in the developing world. These voluntary agencies situated the intimate sphere of the family as a key site in the global struggle against communism, and looked to interventions in foreign child-rearing practices as a means of reshaping the political and economic landscape overseas. My project investigates the international circulation of ideas regarding child psychology and social welfare and charts Americans’ changing understandings of their responsibilities to the world at large.
The Cold War, Professor John Gaddis
Women in America: Twentieth Century, Professor Joanne Meyerowitz
Women in America: Colonial Period-1900, Professor Rebecca Tannenbaum
Formation of Modern American Culture, 1920-present, Professor Matthew Jacobson
“A Family of Nations: International Child Sponsorship in the Postwar Era,” paper accepted for presentation, Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, Fourth International Conference, The Claremont Colleges, March 22-25, 2012
“‘Parents Across the Sea’: Fictive Kinship and the Rehabilitation of Children in Post-World War II Europe,” Conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Columbia University in the City of New York, June 23-25, 2011
“‘An Orphan Age’: Fictive Kinship and the Rehabilitation of Children in Post-World War II Europe,” Twelfth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 3-5, 2011
“Between Deprivation and Depravation: Social Work, Poverty and the Family Service of New Haven,” presented at the Yale Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Colloquium, New Haven, CT, December 7, 2009
Phi Beta Kappa