Event

CHELSEA D. CHAMBERLAIN, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History

 “Institutionalization, Family, and the Meaning of Childhood at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, 1900-1910” (see the paper here).

Chelsea D. Chamberlain is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation explores the rise of diagnostic clinics in the early twentieth-century United States that sorted America's children into the normal, the curably abnormal, and the incurably defective. It investigates how clinicians and everyday people negotiated the hierarchies of moral, physical, and intellectual capability that determined individuals' rights, responsibilities, and access to an unsupervised life.

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KELSEY NORRIS, PhD. Candidate, Department of History

“To Find a Person, or To Find Oneself: Tracing and Family Reunification in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union” (see the paper here)

Kelsey L. Norris is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, The Ties that Bind: World War II-Era Population Displacement and the Politics of Family Reunification in the USSR, 1941-1975, investigates the durability of Soviet kinship ties in the context of total war. It shows that the Soviet Union prioritized returning displaced citizens to Soviet society, rather than to their biological families, and championed a new conception of the Soviet family as tied by a shared Soviet identity, rather than by blood.