Speakers 2021

Mona Gleason is a Professor (and Head until September, 2021) in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is an historian of education with a focus on the history of children and youth.  With Dr. Penney Clark (Faculty of Education, UBC), Mona co-edited Canada’s top journal for research in the history of education, Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation, from 2015 to 2020.

Mona’s research has focused on children’s varied experiences with social inequality, shaped by race, class, gender, size, and age, and the role that educational and medical professionals have played both in deepening and mitigating inequality. The responses of young people and their families to these interventions are centrally important in her work. She is the author of two monographs, co-editor of five edited collections, author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on topics foregrounding the history of children and education in multiple contexts. Her publications appear in publications such as the History of Education Quarterly, the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of Family History, the Journal of Canadian Studies, and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Along with Dr. Tamara Myers, Mona has co-edited a collection of essays highlighting cutting edge research in the history of children and youth in Canada.  That collection, entitled Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Mona has received a number of awards for her scholarship, including being recognized in 2020 with a distinguished Killam Research Award at the University of British Columbia. Along with Dr. Tamara Myers, Mona co-founded the History of Children and Youth Group of the Canadian Historical Association. She is past Vice President of the Canadian History of Education Association. Between 2015 and 2017, Mona served as President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the major international association for scholars in the field.

Recent Awards

• 2020, Killam Research Award, Senior Scholar Category, Killam Trust, UBC.
• 2018-2021, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (Canada)
• 2018, Neil Sutherland Prize for Best Article in the History of Children and Youth in Canada, Canadian Historical Association, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,” History of Education 45, 4 (2016): 446-459.
• 2018, Best Article Prize – History of Sexuality in Canada, Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality, Canadian History Association, for Mona Gleason, “‘Knowing Something I Was Not Meant to Know’: Exploring Vulnerability, Sexuality, and Childhood, 1900-1950,” Canadian Historical Review 98, 1 (March 2017): 35-59.

Lynn M. Thomas is a Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle where she is also an adjunct faculty member in Anthropology and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (2020) and Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003); co-editor of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (2008) and Love in Africa (2009); and a former co-editor of the Journal of African History (2010-15).