ATTENTION PITTSBURGH! ELLEN HERMAN TO SPEAK AT PITT

Pittsburgh History Department Graduate Program Speaker Series, Pittsburgh Consortium for Adoption Studies, University of Pittsburgh School of Arts and Sciences, Department of English, Women’s Studies Program, and Cultural Studies Program Present Scientific Rules for Realness: Matching and Its Critics in American Adoption Ellen Herman Professor of History University of Oregon Tuesday, September 29 4:00 – 6:00 pm History Department Lounge (3703 Posvar Hall) University of Pittsburgh Ellen Herman’s most recent book is Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She has also written about the impact of psychology on public policy and culture during and after World War II: The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995). Her recent work has been supported by fellowships at Harvard Law School and Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, as well as by a major research grant from the Science and Technology Studies Program of the National Science Foundation. During the 2004-2005 academic year, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Harvard University Department of the History of Science. Her current book considers the history of child adoption during the twentieth century as a case study of Continue Reading →

NEW BOOK BY ELLEN HERMAN: KINSHIP BY DESIGN: A HISTORY OF ADOPTION IN THE MODERN UNITED STATES

Our friend Ellen Herman sent me the following notice today about her new book: Kinship by Design: a history of adoption in the modern United States. Woo woo! I know what I’m ordering! I don’t read a lot of adoption books, but this is one I will. Ellen is the creator of the Adoption History Project at the University of Oregon, a wonderful source of of information on our favorite love-to-hate topic. I am especially interested in her work on adoption in therapeutic culture. HINT: the book is on sale at Amazon right now! Ellen HermanKinship by DesignA History of Adoption in the Modern United States368 pages, 15 halftones 6 x 9 © 2008Cloth $70.00ISBN: 9780226327594 Published December 2008Paper $25.00ISBN: 9780226327600 Published December 2008 * Synopsis* Table of Contents* Bio What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans’ answer to this question over the past century, Kinship by Design provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption’s history. Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated privatearrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in Continue Reading →