My intellectual journey began nearly forty years ago. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I took a series of social service positions. I taught fire safety for children for the Minneapolis Fire Department; I taught truant youth at an alternative school; I was a counselor at a group home for disabled youth; I helped chronically unemployed and disabled adults find and keep jobs. During these years, I began to wonder about the meanings commonly given to words like opportunity, responsibility, entitlement, liberty, equality, and justice. I wanted to better understand how social policies interact with a larger political culture.

I decided to explore these questions through graduate studies in policy and legal history and earned my doctorate from Case Western Reserve University in 1998. My doctoral work was conducted under Michael Grossberg, and my dissertation explored how modern social policies and tort law transformed growing-up working-class in American cities between the late-19th and early-20th centuries. After graduate school, I worked for a year as a policy analyst with a Cleveland-area think-tank, before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1999.

In 1998, I helped Kris Lindenmeyer found H-Childhood, a network dedicated to the historical study of childhood that currently connects thousands of scholars world-wide. H-Childhood fostered the communication necessary for the founding of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) in 2001. In the 25 years following 1998, I served H-Childhood and SHCY in numerous roles: Digest Editor, Book-Review Editor, Conference Organizer, Executive Committee Member, Online Editor, Vice-President, and President. 

As the history of childhood was becoming a field in its own right, in 2003 Alan Pomfret persuaded me to join him in building a program in childhood studies at Kings University College in London, Ontario. Our program became the first four-year, undergraduate program teaching sociological, political, legal, and historical approaches toward childhood and youth. It was elevated to departmental status in 2021. Since becoming a department, the program's enrolment has tripled and three full-time faculty positions have been added.

My publications between 1997 and 2007 dealt with the social policy history of intelligence testing, eugenics, education, and children in the state care and appeared in the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of Social History, the History of Education Quarterly, Education Next, and other places. Becoming part of an interdisciplinary childhood studies project at Kings College altered my intellectual trajectory in two ways. I began to read more rigorously within critical theory, and 2) I focused on using the history of ideas to fill-out a larger narrative of childhood. As a result, I published a series of complimentary essays and interviews on the discursive structures of childhood and the power/knowledge relations between the generations in 2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, and 2017. These writings play with the tensions between a humanistic approach toward childhood and youth, and the critique of humanism offered by Michel Foucault`s theses on power and his conceptualization of discourse.

At the center of these writings on language, power, and knowledge is Master-Servant Childhood: a history of the idea of childhood in medieval English culture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). It is an interdisciplinary synthesis that offers a new understanding of childhood in the Middle Ages as a form of master-servant relation embedded in an ancient sense of time as a correspondence between earthly change and eternal order. It insists upon the `historicity` of childhood - the idea that our sense of it is determined historically. The book challenges the misnomer that children were 'little adults' in the Middle Ages, and corrects the prevalent misconceptions that childhood was unimportant, unrecognized, or disregarded. It argues for the value of studying childhood as a structure of thought and feeling, and as an important avenue for exploring large scale historical changes in our sense of what it is to be and become human.

After Master-Servant Childhood, I continued to pursue my interests in a series of multi-media commentaries and interviews for the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) called "Childhood: History & Critique" (CHC). These works were part of a reconfiguration of SHCY's website into a magazine format in 2017-18. Over 160 SHCY features were modeled on CHC and edited by me between 2018 and 2023.    

In the past decade, my research circled back to law and public policy. I wrote a case analysis article on the landmark 1986 Canadian decision E. v. Eve and gave a follow-up interview upon it with Digital Childhoods. At the end of 2024, I published Childhood and the Law in Canada: the family/state relationship with LexisNexis. This book contextualizes six leading or exemplary cases in Canadian law covering paren patriea, the best interest of the child principle, custody and access law, international family law, corporal punishment, child abuse, sexual violence, children's evidence, the duty to report, the law of torts, and the Indian Residential School litigation. The Childhood, Law, and Policy Network was kind enough to conduct a feature interview with me on the book as it was being released. 

I am currently working on a companion to this book tenatively entitled Youth and the Law in Canada: rights of equity and participation. Like Childhood and the Law, it uses leading cases to explore major points of law as they intersect with social and cultural change over time. Once this book is completed, I look forward to returning to a long-term project called Childhood and the Governmental State in America. This is a study of law, labour, poverty, and education in the late-19th through the mid-20th centuries. It examines how childhood and youth became the primary arena for governmental management of the population.

contact: pryan2@uwo.ca