Tracy Steffes
Assistant Professor of Education and History:
Education and History
Phone: +1 401 863 2894
Tracy_Steffes@brown.edu
My research and teaching are animated by a deep interest in the social, intellectual, and political problem of modernizing America, and in particular by an interest in the tensions between modern economy, society, and democracy. My work explores these tensions in the development of American schooling in the early twentieth century.
Biography
Steffes arrives at Brown from the History department of the University of Chicago, where she recently completed her dissertation, "A New Education for a Modern Age: National Reform, State-building, and the Transformation of American Schooling, 1890-1933." Her teaching record includes courses at the University of Chicago, Denison University, and at Indiana University-Northwest. Steffes aims to inform current education policy, such as No Child Left Behind, with insights from educational and policy history.
Interests
My recently completed dissertation, "A New Education for a Modern Age: National Reform, State-building, and the Transformation of American Schooling, 1890-1933," explores the modernization and nationalization of American public schooling in the early twentieth century.
It argues that reformers transformed schools from local, voluntary supplements for home and community into compulsory, state-controlled institutions of public socialization aimed at preparing future workers and citizens for the challenges of modern life. Drawing insights from the interdisciplinary social science effort to "bring the state back in," it explores the growth of state authority over local schools and the sometimes hidden ways in which schools served as important new sites for governing children. I argue that schooling became an important national policy in new ways as the forms and content of the new education were diffused across national space, aided rather than hindered by the persistence of local control and centralization of state authority.
My project explores how reformers envisioned the school as powerful tool for shaping society and molding the individual, investing it with a host of new and sometimes contradictory responsibilities and how the compulsory school became a deliberate but often unacknowledged instrument of state policy and social policing. I argue that schooling, too often absent in accounts of progressive reform and state-building, was a central way in which Americans confronted and managed the challenges of modernity, particularly tensions between democracy and industrial capitalism.
Awards
Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, 2008-2009
PTA National Research Fellowship, 2008
Harry Barnard Dissertation Year History Fellowship, 2005-2006 (declined)
Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector Fellowship, 2004-2005
Miller Center for Public Affairs Fellowship, 2003-2004
University of Chicago Century Fellowship, 1998-2002
Phi Beta Kappa, 1998
Affiliations
American Historical Association
Organization of American Historians
History of Education Society
American Educational Research Association
American Society for Legal History
Teaching
history of American education; nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. history; African-American history; legal history; social thought.
Funded Research
2005-2006: Harry Barnard Dissertation Year History Fellowship,
(declined)
2004-2005: Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy
and Non-Profit Sector Fellowship
2004: Rockefeller Archive Center Travel Grant
2003-2004: Miller Center for Public Affairs Fellowship
2003: Doolittle-Harrison Research Grant, University of Chicago
2003: Freehling Research Grant, University of Chicago
Curriculum Vitae
