Julia Mickenberg

Interests

Biography

Julia Mickenberg is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, The Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006), which won the Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Children's Literature Association's Book Award, the Pacific Coast Branch Award from the American Historical Association, and the Hamilton Book Award. She is also co-editor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (2008) and The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (2011). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and her A.B. from Brown University.

Research Interests

Professor Mickenberg's current book project, for which she was awarded a Humanities Research Award from UT and an NEH fellowship, is tentatively entitled "The New Woman Tries on Red: Russia in the American Feminist Imagination, 1905-1945." Chapters in the book will look at topics such as suffragettes and Soviets, the relationship between the sexual revolution in the U.S. and "revolutionary tourism" to the Soviet Union, U.S. colonies in Soviet Russia, Soviet influence on U.S. creative expression, women journalists as travelers and eyewitnesses, and pro-Soviet children's literature published during World War II. She is also working on a talk/article about radical children's literature in the twenty-first century.

Courses Taught

Main Currents in American Culture, 1865-present; U.S. Cultural History; Society, Culture, and Politics in the 1960s; Women Radicals and Reformers; Children's Literature and American Culture; The Culture of the Cold War; Modernism, Feminism, and Radicalism; Cultures of U.S. Radicalism; The Cold War and American Childhood; Childhood Studies; and Practicum in Teaching American Studies