Prof.Rebecca Jo Plant will be presenting on Child Soldiers: Militarism and American Youth, a book project that she and her collaborator, Frances M. Clarke of the University of Sydney, have undertaken. The project traces debates over the use of child soldiers and the relationship between youth and militarism over two centuries in order to illuminate how changing attitudes toward the U.S. as military nation intersected with evolving attitudes toward childhood and youth. The event will take the form of a workshop with precirculated readings.

Rebecca Jo Plant is an associate professor in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego, since 2002, and is the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and a co-editor of Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the Twentieth Century (Berghahn, 2012). She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University and has been awarded fellowships by the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council for Learned Societies. Plant’s research interests focus on women’s, gender, and family history; the history of therapeutic culture and the psychological professions; and the social and psychological impact of war in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S.

For access to the readings please contact catjones@ucsc.edu.