Dr. Orel Beilinson
Areas of specialization:
History of education; history of the family; history of childhood and youth; Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe
Areas of competence:
social history; cultural history; literary history; early modern Europe; Islamic history (especially Ottoman, Iranian, and Central Asian history); Southern Europe
Personal website
I am a historian of modern Europe. My research revolves around the birth pangs of modernity beyond Western Europe’s industrial core, beyond cities like London, Paris, and Berlin. Most of my work has focused on education, work, and family life in Central and Eastern Europe. I am not great with boundaries, though: I sometimes cross into the Islamic World, return to early modernity, or expand my thematic interest to the history of social structure and the social sciences. My work combines comparative literature and historical sociology to craft richer narratives of social change.
My book manuscript, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Coming of Age with Modern Europe,” began as a doctoral dissertation at Yale University. It is a tale of broken promises and dashed hopes, of a radical change in how adolescents have become adults since the Enlightenment. It shows how parents could no longer secure their children’s life courses and how adolescents gained the right to choose and the responsibility for failure. The book follows young adults seeking their way in a world where the concentration of capital and industrialization have made economic independence unfeasible and undesirable. It is also a book about families struggling to develop new aspirations in a society that offered plenty of choices but little security. “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” tells the story of Europe’s modernization from the perspective of the youth and families struggling to navigate it.
My current research develops these themes in three directions. My dissertation had a series of chapters on the emergence of youth as a political identity, which I am reworking into a short monograph. This monograph will also provide a typology and history of youth movements. I am most invested now in a book that puts youth as the protagonists of urbanization, mass migration, and New Imperialism. In support of this project, I spent 2023–2024 as a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and the University of Lisbon. More embryonic is a study of how STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) overtook the humanities as the Queen of the Sciences. This study combines my interest in the history of education and labor with the social history of the sciences.
Publications:
- “The Strange Case of the Islamic Journeymen: Questions and Texts for a Comparative Study of Guilds,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 67, no. 7 (2024): 703–800.