Megan Birk holds the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence and is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research focuses on the influences of the Progressive Era in the rural United States, and the effects of institutional care on family life. Her first book, Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest, explored the transition between free child placement on farms into the foster care system, and won the Vincent P. DeSantis Prize for Best First Book. Birk’s second monograph, The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms, detailed the significance of local welfare provisions before the New Deal, and explained the role agriculture played in funding community assistance.

She is currently working on a book about home economics departments using babies and toddlers to provide students with “hands-on” learning to prepare them for motherhood. This addition to the curriculum united many facets of progressivism, including scientific study, record keeping, and practical laboratory work, but was also used to help justify the presence of a growing number of young women on college campuses in degree-earning programs. By training women to be professionals and mothers, home economics programs propelled themselves to the forefront of important disciplines including child development, nutrition, and management. The book explores the changing notions of both motherhood and home economics during the early 20th century. Birk is also the current President of the Midwestern History Association.