Laura L. Lovett

Laura L. Lovett (1963-2025)

Our dear colleague Laura Lovett passed away unexpectedly on March 4, 2025. Laura joined Pitt’s History Department and its Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies Program in 2018 after teaching for many years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Laura was a broad-ranging historian of the 20th-century United States who received her PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching focused on questions of gender, family, childhood, race, immigration, feminism, and the environment. Unusual for a US historian, she strove to situate historical developments in the United States within their global contexts. Her first book, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), examines pro-natalist thought and policy in the early twentieth-century US. While writing this book, Laura not only helped create the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth but also founded and co-edited (2005-13) its journal, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. She subsequently produced two edited collections: When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (co-edited with Lori Rotskoff, 2012), and Sex in Global History: Modern Sources and Perspectives (2017, 2019). In 2021 she published her second book, With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Community Activism (Beacon Press), which is a biography of a leading African American civil rights and feminist activist of the 1960s-80s. Laura continued her work on Black feminism with a co-edited (with Rachel Jessica Daniel and Kelly Giles) volume, “It’s Our Movement Now:” Black Women’s Politics and the 1977 National Women’s Conference (University Press of Florida, 2022). At the time of her death, Laura was working on a new book project that explored labor history in Pittsburgh; a co-edited book (with Bridget Keown and Ayah Nurridin) on Gender, Colonialism, and Science, 1750-1950: Environments; and a collaborative research program on the history of racially restrictive housing covenants in Pittsburgh.

Laura was also a passionate teacher deeply involved in the mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. Her teaching stood out for building outreach partnerships with community organizations such as Breakthrough Pittsburgh and Jumpstart Pittsburgh, thus connecting Pitt undergraduates to middle and high school students across the city.

Civic engagement also marked Laura’s extraordinary service record within the Ivory Tower and beyond it. Among her many service accomplishments at Pitt was her directorship of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program (2022-25). At the national level, Laura stood out for her leadership positions at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, which is the most important organization of women’s history in the United States and whose triennial conference is the largest women’s history event in the world. At the same time, Laura poured her heart into community service. A good Pittsburgh example, which also reflected her love for gardening, was her key role in helping the Rivers of Steel program recreate the historic steelworkers’ garden that was part of the Carrie Furnace site. Most recently, Laura served on the steering committee of the Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights and participated in the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teach Scholar Program.

Laura’s children, Lydia and Charlie, survive her, as does her spouse of 35 years, Michael Dietrich, Professor and Chair of Pitt’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science. To learn more about Laura’s rich life and to share memories of her, please click here.

Read more about Laura Lovett in this University Times article.