Awards and Service
- Rotunda Outstanding Professor, SMU, 2004
- Deschner Teaching Award, Women’s Studies Program, SMU, 2002
-
Honorable Mention, Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding
Dissertation Award, Brown University, 1999
- Dissertation fellowship, American Association of University Women, 1995-96
- Teacher at Makhokho Secondary School, Kenya, Harvard University’s WorldTeach Program, 1988-1989
Books and Essays
- Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
- Editor, Women's Rights, ABC-Clio,
Perspectives in American Social History Series,
forthcoming
- “Hall, G. Stanley” in The Encyclopedia of New England Culture, ed. Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters New Haven: Yale University Press
, 2005
- “Puberty” in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood, Macmillan Reference, 2004
- Numerous conference papers and reviews in journals such as American Nineteenth
Century, Modernism/Modernity, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Professor Crista DeLuzio examines the roles that women, children, and families play in facilitating historical change. Her contributions are built upon three bodies of literature: the history of women and gender, the history of childhood, and the history of
science.
In Female Adolescence, DeLuzio
argues that there were certain key moments in scientific thought between 1830 and 1940 when the figure of the girl exemplified the
meanings and mandates of development during the teenage years, thereby playing a central role in the
formulation of the modern concept of adolescence as a critical stage of life.
For instance, pioneering developmental psychologist G. Stanley Hall characterized
adolescence as a "feminized" stage of development in his widely read Adolescence (1904), the first book in the nascent discipline of psychology to depict adolescence as a distinct life stage. Because of the profound biological changes the girl experienced during puberty, he argued, she stood out as the quintessential adolescent and served as the model for such traits as physical and mental volatility, emotionality, altruism, dependence, and religiosity that Hall ascribed to the teenage boy, as well.
Previous work assumed that femininity and adolescence had long been deemed irreconcilable categories in scientific thought, that the associations of adolescence with identity formation, exertions of
independence, sexual experimentation, and rebellion had little to do with the meanings or experiences of girlhood.
Thus, earlier scholars attended almost exclusively to the masculine coding of the
modern construct of adolescence, primarily taking notice of the ways in which gender, class, and race intersected in conceptualizations of adolescence so as to give meaning to the experiences of the white, middle-class boy.
Without disputing the basic contention that the boy has most often served as the normative adolescent, DeLuzio nonetheless complicates this assumption by examining the various and often competing ways in which medical doctors, psychologists, and anthropologists attempted to define femininity and adolescence in relationship to one another and by assessing the significance of such attempts for conceptualizations of the adolescent girl as a figure in her own right, as well as for the modern concept of adolescence itself.
Her next project will examine the ways in which a changing cultural discourse about the relationships among brothers and sisters
at the turn of the twentieth century reflected and also helped to facilitate broader changes in concepts of gender and sexuality, age relations, modes of child rearing, and family form,
function, and values.
DeLuzio’s study of the role of sibling relationships in American culture will trace the discourse within the dominant culture of the white middle-class, as well as the meanings given to those relations by racial and ethnic minorities. She will consider the ways in which competing expectations for sibling relations may have served as a site of struggle among various groups in American society. |
