Andy Byford, "Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jun 27, 2026 · 1h 22m

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Those who claimed children as special objects of investigation were initially spread across a network of imperfectly professionalized scholarly and occupational groups based mostly in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology. From their various perspectives, they made ambitious claims about the contributions that their emergent expertise made to the understanding of, and…