Dr. Margaret Tillman: ’23 Student History Conference Keynote Speaker

“Building a Better World in an Atomic Age: UNESCO’s Mass Communications Platforms for Student Voices”

Promoted to Associate Professor
Department of History, Purdue University

Margaret Tillman completed a Ph.D. in Chinese history and a B.A. in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on East Asian history and in the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program.

Dr. Tillman’s research focuses on cross-cultural contestations over identity formation and knowledge production in China in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her monograph Raising China’s Revolutionaries: Modernizing Childhood for Cosmopolitan Nationalists and Liberated Comrades, 1920s-1950s charts the transnational establishment of child welfare as a lens for examining the introduction of new sensibilities about childhood innocence and sentimentalization.

Her current research project, Tested, explores the ways that Chinese youth responded to curricular changes regarding academic promotion. A major focus of this story is the transnational establishment of educational psychology as a discipline and its innovation in testing and contests as a result of wartime experiences. Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Taiwan Fulbright have funded this research.

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