Richard Alan Meckel

Associate Professor, American Civilization:
American Civilization
Phone: +1 401 863 3609
Phone 2: +1 401 863 2896
Richard_Meckel@Brown.EDU

Richard Meckel's research is centered in the intersections between historical demography and epidemiology, the history of public health and medicine, and the history of child social and medical welfare. He is especially interested in the role of the state in promoting child health and is currently examining a century and a half of largely unrealized plans to use the public school to improve the physical and emotional well-being of the nation's young.

Biography

Richard Meckel (Ph.D. American Culture, University of Michigan) is Associate Professor of American Civilization at Brown. He is a U.S. social and cultural historian, primarily of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose research and teaching interests include the histories of immigration and ethnicity, childhood and child welfare, medicine and publics health, and epidemiology and demography. He is author of Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929 (1990;1998), and is co-editor of Children and Youth in Sickness and Health (2004). In addition, he is author of variety of book chapters and articles ranging in topic from early twentieth-century Italian-American literature to mid-nineteenth-century urban morbidity and mortality trends.

Interests

Professor Meckel's ongoing research projects include two book-length studies, "Classrooms and Clinics: The American School Hygiene Movement," which looks at the late 19th- and early 20th-century reform movement aimed at safeguarding and improving the health of the nation's school aged children, and "Conserving the Young? Child Health Policy in 20th Century America," which explores the interaction between medicine, philanthropy, and the state in the origin and evolution of 20th century American Child Health Policy.

Awards

2003: National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship

2002: National Library of Medicine, Major Publication Grant

2000: Small Grant Program Award, Brown University

1998: Spencer Foundation Research Grant

1990: Ford Foundation Odyssey Grant

1988: Henry M. Wriston Fellowship and Teaching Award, Brown University

Affiliations

American Association of the History of Medicine

American Studies Association

Organization of American Historians

Teaching

Professor Meckel teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American Civilization and History. Among the courses he has taught are: "The Divided Self: Identity and Culture in America; The History of Immigration to the US; The History of Childhood; The History of US Child Welfare; Immigrant and Ethnic Literature; Italians and Jews in Urban America; Children and Families in American History; American Studies: Theory and Method.

Funded Research

2003: National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship

2002: National Library of Medicine, Major Publication Grant

1998: Spencer Foundation Research Grant