Diana Selig, Ph.D.

Kingsley Croul Associate Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow

Department

History

Biography

Diana Selig is a scholar of twentieth-century U.S. history and is currently the faculty advisor for Gender and Sexuality Studies. She teaches courses on race and inequality, gender, American schools, women’s political history, and LGBTQ history.  She received the Claremont Colleges diversity and inclusion award in teaching and twice received the Queer Resource Center faculty award for her support of LGBTQ students.

Professor Selig is author of the book Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Harvard University Press), which tells the story of early efforts at multicultural education in the United States. The book examines the vibrant campaign to overcome racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice that flourished between the world wars. It demonstrates how the movement's failure to confront the entrenched forms of discrimination and disfranchisement that African Americans faced limited its vision for diversity and its power to effect change. She is now at work on a study of the memory of the women's suffrage movement in American political and cultural life in the years after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Education

B.A., Yale University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Awards and Affiliations

Claremont Colleges Diversity and Inclusion Award in Teaching

National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship

Honorable Mention, Gustavus Myers Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

Research and Publications

Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Harvard University Press, 2008, paperback edition, 2011)

"Celebrating Cultural Diversity in the 1920s," OAH Magazine of History 21:3 (July 2007): 41-46.

"The Whole Child: Social Science and Race at the White House Conference of 1930," in When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare in 20th-Century American, ed. Barbara Beatty, Emily D.Cahan, and Julia Grant (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 136-156.

"World Friendship: Children, parents, and Peace Education in America between the Wars," in Children and War, ed. James marten (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 135-146

Contact
Email for meeting times, locations, and links
Tuesdays and Thursdays, outdoors
Wednesdays, via Zoom