Dr. Nancy G. Rosoff, dean of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies, presented her paper, “’I have been very proud of my girls’: Principals and Headmistresses in British and American School Stories,” during the annual Women’s History Network conference in September in London.

The paper examined the presentation of professional women in school stories and suggested how they served as models for their readers. The research extended several of the themes discussed in British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity, and Friendship, the book Dr. Rosoff wrote with Dr. Stephanie Spencer, professor of the History of Women’s Education at the University of Winchester in England.

British American School Stories is a historical analysis that examines how reading select British and American school stories contributed to the formation of gender identity for teenage girls in the early to mid-twentieth century.