Professor Battenfeld’s interdisciplinary scholarship includes publications on the history of adoption, the civil rights movement, and children’s literature. Her most recent research focuses on education history and policy, with articles on charter schools, parent engagement, and federal education laws. In Notable Books, Notable Lessons: Putting Social Studies Back into the K-8 Curriculum (ABC-CLIO, 2017), co-authored with Andrea S. Libresco and Jeannette Balantic, she examines the decline of social studies in the era of No Child Left Behind, and offers practical lessons for using children’s literature to prepare students to think critically and participate in our multicultural democracy. Her current book project (with Andrea S. Libresco), Raising Citizens, focuses on the development of civic engagement in children.
Mary Battenfeld comes to BU’s American and New England Studies Program from Wheelock College, where she was a tenured full professor of Humanities and Chair of General Education. At Wheelock, she served on numerous faculty committees, including Faculty Senate and Curriculum Committee, and in 2012 was awarded the Edward H. Ladd Award for Academic Excellence and Service. She is also the former President of the New England American Studies Association, and has been a Fulbright Scholar, and an NEH fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.