2025-26 Postdoctoral Fellow
About
Allie Goodman studies the social and political history of the 20th Century United States. Her work places the history of the carceral state in conversation with legal history and the history of childhood and youth, centering questions about power, law, citizenship, custody, consent, and meaning-making. Her current research examines Chicago’s Juvenile Court and connected systems of caretaking, welfare, and institutionalization. She is primarily interested in upending frameworks that study competing custody claims to instead center the voices and stories of impacted children and youth. Her dissertation has been supported by the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, the Adele Hast Fellowship in American Studies at the Newberry Library, the History Summer Writing Institute Research Fellowship, the Rackham Humanities Candidacy Fellowship, and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Graduate Fellowship.
As a Postdoctoral Fellow, Goodman will prepare her first book manuscript based on her PhD dissertation, tentatively titled, “Incorrigible: Youth and Family Policing at the Dawn of Chicago’s Juvenile Legal System, 1899-1928.” During the fellowship period, she will expand attention to the connection between public schools in Progressive Era Chicago and the interconnected networks of courts, extra-legal arrangements, deterrents, and punitive institutions.
In 2025-26, Goodman will teach courses on "The Kids Aren’t Alright: Child Protection, Deviance, and Defiance in 20th Century United States" and "Law and Social Justice."
