Stephanie Olsen

Stephanie Olsen (Ph.D, FRHistS) is an historian of childhood, youth, education, experiences and the emotions, with a particular focus on the British world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is a Senior Researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (Tampere University), previously at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, (History of Emotions) (Berlin) and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (Harvard University). 

She is the author of Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen (Bloomsbury, 2014), co-author of Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, c. 1870-1970 (Oxford University Press, 2014), and editor of Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (Palgrave, 2015). Her research focuses on the ‘Lived Nation’ in the context of the British Empire, specifically children’s (informal) education in the context of the First World War and the ‘limits’ of those experiences, including children’s stories and dreams. She is the co-editor of The Cultural History of Youth (6 volumes, Bloomsbury, 2023) and Children, Childhood and Youth in the Long Nineteenth Century (4 volumes, Routledge, 2024), and edits the journal History of Education.

History of experiences; history of childhood and youth; history of emotions; Britain and Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Monographs

• Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen. London: Bloomsbury, 2014 (paperback edition, 2015) [reviews in American Historical Review, Victorian Periodicals Review, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, Social History, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Children and Society].

• [with Ute Frevert, et al] Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, 1870-1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 [reviews in Journal of Social History, Journal of Gender Studies, Historia y Memoria de la Educación, English Historical Review, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth]; Traditional Chinese translation: Owl Publishing House, 2018; German translation: Wie Kinder fühlen lernten: Kinderliteratur und Erziehungsratgeber 1870-1970. Weinheim: Beltz, 2021.

Edited books

• Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives. London: Palgrave, 2015 [reviews in International Journal of Play, Journal of Social History, H-net Reviews, Histoire Sociale/Social History].

• Co-Editor, 6-volume A Cultural History of Youth series (Bloomsbury, 2023). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-history-of-youth-9781350032682/

• Co-Editor, 4-volume Children, Childhood and Youth in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Primary Source Collection (Routledge, forthcoming).

Articles and book chapters

• “Voices and Sources: Lessons from the History of Childhood,” Digital Handbook of the History of Experience. https://sites.tuni.fi/hexhandbook/methodology/voices-and-sources-lessons-from-the-history-of-childhood/, 2023.

• “Crianças, infância e formação emocional” in Infância, juventude e emoções na história da educação, ed. Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha and Pablo Toro Blanco (Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço 2022).

• Olsen, Stephanie “Mapping the History of Education: Intersections and Regional Trends,” co-written with Heather Ellis and Mark Freeman, History of Education, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2022.2130442.

• Millei, Z. (2021). Temporalizing Childhood: A Conversation with Erica Burman, Stephanie Olsen, Spyros Spyrou, and Hanne Warming. Journal of Childhood Studies, 46(4), 59-73. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs464202120211

• “Historicizing Emotional Development” and “Emotional Frontiers,” co-written with Karen Vallgårda, The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development, Daniel Dukes, Andrea C. Samson and Eric Walle, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

• “The History of Experience: Afterword,” co-written with Josephine Hoegaerts, Lived Nation, Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki & Tanja Vahtikari, eds. London: Palgrave, 2021.

• “Children and Childhood,” Vol. 5. Cultural History of Education, Heather Ellis, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

• “Editorial,” co-written with Heather Ellis and Mark Freeman, History of Education, 49.1, 2020, pp. 1-3.

• “Children's Emotional Formations in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, around the First World War,” Special Issue of Social and Cultural History: Young People and the World Wars: Materialities, Memories and Cultural Heritage, Kate Darian-Smith and Ana Carden-Coyne, eds, DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2019.1658838 (Aug. 2019).

• “Styling Emotions History” co-written with Rob Boddice. Special Issue of the Journal of Social History, Volume 51, Issue 3, 1 February 2018, pp. 476-487, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shx067

• “The History of Childhood and the Emotional Turn,” History Compass (2017): 1–10, 10.1111/hic3.12410.

• “Learning how to feel through play: at the intersection of the histories of play, childhood and the emotions,” International Journal of Play, 2016. DOI: 10.1080/21594937.2016.1243197

• “Men and the Periodical Press,” Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals, Alexis Easley, Andrew King and John Morton, eds. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016.

• “‘Happy Home’ and ‘Happy Land:’ Informal Emotional Education in British Bands of Hope, 1880-1914,” Historia y Memoria de la Educación, special issue: "La transmisión de emociones y sentimientos. Subjetividad y socialización" [The transmission of emotions and sentiments. Subjectivity and socialization], núm. 2, December, 2015.

• “Introduction,” Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives. London: Palgrave, 2015.

• “Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood” with Karen Vallgårda and Kristine Alexander, Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives. London: Palgrave, 2015.

• “Adolescence and the Moral Empire: Dangerous Boys in Britain and India, c. 1880-1914,” Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850-2000, Heather Ellis, ed. London: Palgrave, 2014.

• “Introduction,” Learning How to Feel [with Pascal Eitler and Uffa Jensen]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

• “Dickon’s Trust,” Learning How to Feel [collaborative monograph]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

• “Informal Education: Emotional Conditioning and Enculturation,” Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung: “Emotionen in der Bildungsgeschichte,” 2012.

• “The Authority of Motherhood in Question: fatherhood and the moral education of children in England, c. 1870–1900,” Women’s History Review, 18, 5 (November 2009), 765-780.

• “Towards the Modern Man: Edwardian Boyhood in the Juvenile Periodical Press,” Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time, Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 159-176 [winner of the inaugural Children’s Literature Association Edited Book Award 2011].

• “Daddy’s Come Home: Evangelicalism, Fatherhood and Lessons for Boys in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Fathering 5, 3 (2007), 174-196.

• “Hollow Men? The Cultural and Economic Legacy of the First World War.” The Mirror. XXII, April 2002. (London, Ont.: The University of Western Ontario): 68-77.

Other Publications (selected)

• Book Review: Childhood in Modern Europe by Colin Heywood, American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1500–1501, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1267.

• Book Review: Fatherhood and the British Working Class by Julie-Marie Strange, Journal of British Studies, 57, 4, October 2018, pp. 912-914.

• Book Review: The Children’s War: Britain, 1914-1918 by Rosie Kennedy, History of Education, 44, 6, (2015): 767-769.

• Book Review: Ambition, A History: from Vice to Virtue by William Casey King, Sehepunkte, 13 (2013): 9.

• Book Review. Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-war Years by Melanie Tebbutt, Journal of British Studies, 52, 03 (July 2013): 820-82