Laura L. Lovett, director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program (beginning in 2022), who helped found the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth and co-edited its journal (2005-13), died March 4, 2025 at 61.
Lovett’s colleague in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ history department, Ruth Mostern, met Lovett in graduate school at the University of California–Berkeley in 1990; they joined the Pitt faculty together in 2018.
“What a huge loss this is for gender history and childhood history, for our history department at Pitt, as well as for many of us who were touched by her sunny, energetic and thoughtful personality,” Mostern said.
While Lovett’s academic focus was on the United States in the 20th century and Mostern’s was on medieval China, “we had a lot of overlapping interests and a lot of overlapping sensibilities,” Mostern recalled.
Both were members of an environmental humanities working group that involved Pitt and Carnegie Mellon faculty. They sat together on the same graduate student committees. “And we are both people who have a passionate commitment to good government in the department and at the University,” Mostern said, with “a shared vision for a department and University that were just and democratic and supportive of academic freedom.”
As a scholar, Lovett’s work “was always to build connections, to make things happen, to bring people together ... She was someone who was always organizing conferences, events, connecting people with one another.”
Her first book concerned “how science shaped society and how society shaped science,” Mostern explained. “Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930” (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) examines the push for certain groups to have more children, which has historically borne both the stamp of eugenics as well as the possibility of threatening women’s reproductive rights – and is seeing a resurgence on the right today.
“She would have had so much to say at this political moment,” Mostern said. “I hear her voice of outrage and moral courage in my head.”
Mostern visited Lovett in the hospital several months ago, when Lovett was recovering from a bicycle accident.
“I asked what I could bring her,” Mostern remembered, “and I expected she might want food that wasn't hospital food” — or perhaps some books. “What she wanted me to bring instead of that was a cutting from a house plant” to give as a present to a helpful nurse. “That's one of the memories I will carry most into the future — her generosity, making connections with other people and bringing together a whole community ... in order to be someone who could help people’s needs.”
Born on Feb. 2, 1963, Laura L. Lovett attended UCLA as an undergraduate and then UC–San Diego for her master’s degree in English and American literature. After earning her Ph.D. at Berkeley, she taught at the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga, Dartmouth College and the University of Massachusetts–Amherst before joining Pitt.
Lovett’s research and teaching, her department noted in a remembrance, “focused on questions of gender, family, childhood, race, immigration, feminism and the environment. Unusual for a U.S. historian, she strove to situate historical developments in the United States within their global contexts. 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.”
She edited two 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). Her second book was “With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Community Activism (Beacon Press, 2021), a portrait of the African-American civil rights and feminist activist of the 1960s-80s.
She also co-edited “It’s Our Movement Now: Black Women’s Politics and the 1977 National Women’s Conference” (with Rachel Jessica Daniel and Kelly Giles, University Press of Florida, 2022). Most recently, she had several projects in progress: a book on labor history in Pittsburgh; a co-edited book, “Gender, Colonialism, and Science, 1750-1950: Environments” (with Bridget Keown and Ayah Nurridin); and a collaborative research program on the history of Pittsburgh’s racially restrictive housing covenants.
She had a leadership position with the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, which holds the world’s largest conference on women’s history every three years, and served on the Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights’ steering committee. Locally, she helped the Rivers of Steel program re-create the steelworkers’ garden as part of the Carrie Furnace site.
This weekend, March 21-22, the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program will hold a conference that she organized: “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”: Childhood, Gender, Play and Culture, which involves the author of the American Girl Doll books and an exhibit at the Heinz History Center.
She is survived by her parents, Sandra and Bill Lovett; her sister, Terrin Irwin; her partner, Michael Dietrich; and her children, Lydia Lovett-Dietrich and her partner Emily Derosier and Charlie Lovett-Dietrich.
Memorial gifts are suggested to Grow Pittsburgh or to other feminist and climate action groups.
— Marty Levine