Prof. Dr. Charles Dorn

Charles Dorn is the Barry N. Wish Professor of Social Studies in the Education Department at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. His research examines the civic purposes adopted by and ascribed to centers of early childhood education, public elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities. His work has appeared in American Journal of Education, Diplomatic History, Teachers College Record, and History of Education Quarterly as well as Fortune Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2012, Dorn received a U.S. Fulbright Scholar Award to the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press, 2017) and, with coauthor Randall Curren, Patriotic Education in a Global Age (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His current project explores the history of environmental education in the United States between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.

RCC Research Project: Learning through Nature: A History of Environmental Education in America

Selected Publications:

• “‘I Never Saw as Good a Nature Show Before’: Walt Disney, Environmental Education, and the True-Life Adventures.” History of Education Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2023): 243–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2022.12. 
• “‘A New Global Ethic’: A History of the United Nations International Environmental Education Program, 1975–1995.” Foro de Educación 18, no. 2 (2020): 83–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.808. 
• with Randall Curren. Patriotic Education in a Global Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017.
• “‘It Was a Sort of Soft War That One Waged’: Teacher Education at the University of Cape Town, 1976–1994.” Southern African Review of Education 19, no. 2 (2013): 48–71.
• with Kristen Ghodsee. “The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: Communism, UNESCO, and the World Bank.” Diplomatic History 36, no. 2 (2012): 373–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2011.01026.x.