Monday Seminar:
Julia Mickenberg
Honorary Fellow (2009-2010)
American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
This presentation will offer an overview of a book-in-progress that seeks to understand Russia’s place in the imagination and self-fashioning of financially independent, sexually liberated, and socially conscious American women, among them well-known suffragists, socialists, journalists, educators, authors, reformers, and artists. More than simply an interesting episode in women’s history, the largely forgotten “Russian chapter” in American feminism highlights themes basic to the development of Western feminist thought, ideas about love, work, citizenship, motherhood, creativity, childrearing, sex, and friendship, and also about class, justice, and the ideal society.
Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliate of the Center for Women and Gender Studies, the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and the Center for European Studies. She is the author of Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford, 2006), which won several awards, and co-editor (with Philip Nel) of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (NYU: 2008). In addition to the IRH project, she is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature with Lynne Vallone. Mickenberg teaches courses on the 1960s, the 1930s, the Cold War, children’s literature, childhood studies, women’s history, and radicalism in the United States.