Description:

Susan J. Pearson is an historian of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States at Northwestern University. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina. 

Dr. Pearson is particularly interested in the cultural politics of reform, the expansion of the state and forms of governance, and the development of American liberalism. She is the author of the prize-winning book, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and essays and articles in The Journal of American History, History and Theory, The Journal of Social History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

Pearson is now at work on a new project that examines the spread of compulsory and universal birth registration in the United States. Her research details how a once-locally and unevenly-practiced form of recordkeeping became the most essential mechanism for recording and establishing individual identity.