Susan Porter

Areas of Expertise

History; Oral History; Public History; Gender Studies

Email: sporter@brandeis.edu

Current Project

Susan is completing a book, Gendered Benevolence: Orphan Asylums in Antebellum America (under contract to Johns Hopkins University Press), about several American orphanages established before 1820 and the life experiences of the hundreds of children who lived in them. She is also working on two other nineteenth-century social history projects, one on domestic service and another on urban boarding houses.

Biography

Susan Porter is an historian and an experienced museum professional who is on the faculty of the Harvard Extension School. While her primary research fields are nineteenth-century American social history, gender history, and child welfare history, she also plans, researches, and implements museum interpretations, exhibitions, and oral history projects. Susan served as Associate Professor of History at Simmons College (1990-1997) and has also taught at several other institutions. She received two fellowships at Radcliffe (1989-1990; 1997-1999). Her public history work includes a position as Research Manager at Historic New England (2000-2005) and various consulting jobs. Susan’s publications include two co-authored books, Becoming American Jews (Brandeis University Press, 2009) and The Pierce House Historic Property Report (Historic New England, 2005), an edited book, Women of the Commonwealth, Work, Family, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), and several articles.

Education

Ph.D., Boston University

M.A., University of Massachusetts

A.B., Smith College

Representative Publications

Porter, Susan.  “A Good Home: Indenture and Adoption in American Orphanages, 1800-1850.”  Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives.  Ed. E. Wayne Carp.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Dwyer-Ryan, Meaghan, Susan L. Porter, and Lisa Fagin Davis, Becoming American Jews, Temple Israel of Boston. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009.

Links

Curriculum Vitae