Bio: 
Barbara Levy Simon’s professional interests include the history of social work, social welfare, and professions. She applies frameworks of analysis from women and gender studies to applied professional settings and postcolonial contexts of social work practice.  In 1987, Simon published Never Married Women with Temple University Press; in 1994 she published The Empowerment Tradition in American Social Work: A History with Columbia University Press, which is available electronically since 1999.  She and her colleague, Warren Green, are currently under contract with Columbia University Press for a co-edited book, Columbia University Guide to Social Work Writing in the 21st Century, which will be published in 2010. Her current research focuses on social workers’ responses in practice and in print to immigrants and migrants in the New York region between 1914 and 1929.

Barbara Levy Simon earned her M.S.S. and Ph.D. degrees in social work from Bryn Mawr College’s School of Social Work and Social Research.  Simon has taught at Columbia University’s School of Social Work since 1986.  She has also taught courses at Columbia University’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and at City College of the City University of New York.  Prior to 1986, she taught social work and women’s studies at La Salle College in Philadelphia and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Research Interests: 

• History of social work and social welfare
• History of urban professions
• Social Work and women's and gender studies
• Postcolonial approaches to social work practice
• Social movements influential in social work’s evolution globally
• Gay, lesbian, and queer populations
• Religious roots of contemporary social work
• Immigration and social work in the 19th – 21st centuries

Current Projects:

• Pivotal ideas in social work’s formation in colonial and postcolonial contexts
• Presbyterians, Episcopalians and the fresh-air movement
• Co-Editor with Warren Green of the Columbia Guide to Social Work Writing in the 21st Century (to be published in 2010)
  

Select Publications:

Simon, Barbara L. (2006). A Study in Still Life: The Social Construction of Female Adolescence during the HIV/AIDS Pandemic. Forum in Women's and Gender Studies, 77(1), 65-77.

Simon, Barbara L. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 1843-1939. Encyclopedia of the History of Social Welfare. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.

Simon, Barbara L. Scientific Philanthopy. Encyclopedia of the History of Social Welfare. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.

Simon, Barbara L. Building on the Romance of Women's Innate Strengths: Social Feminism and Its Influence at the Henry Street Settlement, 1893-1993. In K. J. Peterson & Alice Lieberman, eds. Building on Women's Strengths, 2nd ed, pp. 22-44. NY: Haworth, 2001.

Last updated July 01, 2009.