Previous Years


2007

Susan Strasser is Professor of History at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in 1978 from SUNY Stony Brook and has been at UD since 1999. She is the author of Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982), Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989), and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999); the co-author of Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (2000) and Washington: Images of a State's Heritage (1988); and the co-editor of Getting and Spending: American and European Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (1988) and Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885-1933 (1998). A scholar of everyday life in a consumer culture, she has taught courses on American industrialization, environmental history, business history, and the history of consumption.

Arwen Mohun specializes in the social and cultural history of technology. She received a B.A. in Music from UC Santa Cruz in 1984 and her Ph.D. in History from Case Western Reserve University in 1992. Her publications include Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in Great Britain and the United States and His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology (co-editor with Roger Horowitz). Her current research explores the impact of industrialization on responses to risk through a series of case studies including lightning rods and amusement parks.

Will Scott, a newly hired Assistant Professor of History at the University of Delaware, specializes in the histories of gender and consumerism.  He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College (1992), his M.A. from the University of California Berkeley (2002), and will receive his Ph.D from Berkeley in 2007.  He taught middle-school history for seven years in Inglewood (Los Angeles) and San Francisco public schools, including stints as a mentor teacher and humanities department chair.  He has published articles on "lifestyle marketing" in the men's clothing industry and on oral history pedagogy in secondary school classrooms. He previously worked with Oakland's Teaching American History grant in California.