Rate My Professor Ellen Herman

Ellen Herman is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Oregon, where she formerly served as Department Head of History, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs from 2017 to 2020, and Faculty Co-Director of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics from 2016 to 2024. She currently holds the position of Senior Scholar at the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. A historian of the modern United States, her research examines the human sciences, social engineering, and therapeutic culture, with particular attention to psychology, family, kinship, adoption, gender, sexuality, disability, and autism. Her major publications include The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995), Psychiatry, Psychology, and Homosexuality (Chelsea House, 1995), and Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the latter tracing twentieth-century adoption practices as engineered kinship to reduce uncertainty in family formation.

Herman's scholarship has been supported by fellowships from Harvard Law School, Radcliffe’s Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), as well as a major research grant from the National Science Foundation Program in Science and Technology Studies. She received additional funding for The Adoption History Project, a digital resource on U.S. adoption history encompassing people, organizations, topics, and studies from the twentieth century, backed by NSF Grant No. 0094318, Project ECHO, and the Viola W. Bernard Foundation. Her current project, “Autism, Between Rights and Risks,” investigates autism as a developmental disability since 1945, addressing clinical entity status, advocacy, education, early intervention, neurodiversity, and risk-based political mobilization. Herman also advanced digital public history through The Autism History Project and contributed to historians’ amicus briefs in same-sex marriage cases post-2010, one cited in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).