Rachel Conrad is Professor of Childhood Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Her scholarship integrates critical social studies of childhood and literary studies in recovering and reading youth-authored texts. She teaches interdisciplinary courses on critical childhood and youth studies, twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry of childhood, and youth-authored texts. Her courses focus on centering young people’s participation, cultural creation, and political action and activism.

She is the author of Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (2020) and co-editor (with L. Brown Kennedy) of Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods (2020). Her current project focuses on poetry written by young African American poets in the 1960s and 1970s.

Rachel Conrad received an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is an editor with the University of Massachusetts Press book series “Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood and Youth.” She is co-founder and co-facilitator of the Five College Faculty Seminar on Childhood Studies and co-founder of the Hampshire College Critical Studies of Childhood, Youth, and Learning program. From 2019 through 2021, she served as Director for Academic Innovation at Hampshire College, facilitating and managing the development and implementation of Hampshire’s new transdisciplinary curriculum.