Lecture with Distinguished Women Scholar Dr. Paula Fass
The History Department is sponsoring a Distinguished Women Scholars Lecture next month by Dr. Paula Fass. This visit is cosponsored by the Departments of English and Women's Studies, and the School of Child and Youth Care.
Dr. Fass will hold a colloquium for History, English, and Women's Studies faculty and graduate students on Thursday, March 1st from 1:15 to 2:30 in Clearihue B215, where she will present a historiographical interpretation of work in the History of Childhood during the previous half century.
Dr. Fass's public lecture will be held on March 1, at 7:00 pm, in David Strong 116. Her talk, "The Child Centered Family: New Rules in Post World War II America," reexamines the notion that child-centeredness has dominated middle class family life since World War II. Instead, Fass argues that parents began to limit children's freedom and autonomy in serious ways that have become manifest in the severe restrictions and intense supervisions of the 21st century.
Dr. Paula Fass is the United States’s preeminent historian of twentieth-century American childhood. Fass earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1974, where she studied under Richard Hofstadter. Her first book, _The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s_ (1979) helped to create the modern field of the history of childhood. She is a founder and past president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, a transnational organization with members in Canada, the United States, Sweden, Italy, Israel, and beyond. Fass has published seven books and over thirty articles and book chapters on the subjects of children, youth and education. She has been invited to give distinguished lectures at universities, museums, and libraries across the world, including in Sweden, Turkey, Italy, Poland, and Canada. She has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Linkoping University in Sweden. Fass has had a thirty-five year career at the University of California Berkeley, during which she has held several named chairs. She is now a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.