Hello and welcome. I am a historian of modern Europe, with research specialties in the history of childhood, gender, and education. Since August 2017, I have been an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Morris, teaching modern European and world history; I am also an affiliated faculty member of the Center for German & European Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class is my first book, forthcoming in July 2021 from the University of Massachusetts Press.

I received my Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2015, where my dissertation, Reading Agency: The Making of Modern German Childhoods in the Age of Revolutions, received the Best Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities in 2016. On the Twin Cities campus, I also worked as a Graduate Writing Consultant in the Center for Writing.

On this site you can find out more about my research, teaching, and other professional activities. To contact me, please see details here.

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A note on the website header image you see above: The Fairy Tale Fountain (Märchenbrunnen) in Berlin’s Volkspark Friedrichshain was designed by Ludwig Hoffmann. It opened in 1913, featuring various characters from tales in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Hänsel & Gretel, Rotkäppchen (Red Riding Hood), Die sieben Raben (The Seven Ravens), and so on. The fountain shows us how fairy tales were taken for granted as a sentimental symbol of childhood and social instrument by the early twentieth century in Germany, although these stories bore a quite different set of meanings less than a century earlier. This cultural shift is one result of the transformations in childhood and reading during the years around 1800 which I investigate in my research.

Photograph of the Märchenbrunnen im Volkspark Friedrichshain (2009) by Emily Bruce is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.