Victoria Cain Biography

About

Victoria Cain is an Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. Professor Cain studies and teaches about the cultural and social history of the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on popular knowledge, visual culture and youth. She is the author of Schools and Screens (forthcoming from the 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. Her research has been published in Isis, History of Education Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Paedagogica Historica, the Journal of Visual Culture, Science in Context, American Quarterly, among others, and she has contributed chapters to anthologies published by Oxford University Press. 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.

Professor Cain is currently helping to build the COVID-19 Digital Archive, a public digital archive chronicling daily life amidst the pandemic. Committed to capturing the diversity of experiences of this extraordinary time, the archive is working with underrepresented communities to ensure all people can share and preserve their stories.