Experience:
Victoria Cain is an Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. Her research and teaching focuses on the cultural and social history of the twentieth-century United States, and she takes special interest in the history of visual culture, technology, and education. She is the author of Schools and Screens (MIT Press, 2021) and the co-author, with Karen Rader of Life on Display: Revolutionizing Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century United States (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Life on Display received awards from the History of Education Society and the American Educational Research Association. She has published articles in Isis, History of Education Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Paedagogica Historica, Journal of Visual Culture, Science in Context, and American Quarterly, among others. She received her doctoral degree from Columbia University and her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Mellon Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty, she was an Assistant Professor / Faculty Fellow in Museum Studies at New York University.
Selected Publications
- “From Sesame Street to Prime Time School Television: Educational Media in the Wake of the Coleman Report,” History of Education Quarterly v. 57, no. 4, 2017, 590-601.
- “Present Tense: Histories of Science in Boston’s Museums,” invited contribution, special issue on “Histories of Science in Museums”, Isis, v. 108, no. 2, 2017, 381-389.
- “The Changing Roles of Museums,” co-authored with Karen Rader, Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication, ed. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dietram Scheufele, and Dan Kahan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).