Education
BA, MA (Victoria), Ph. D (Ottawa)
Teaching fields: Canada; childhood, youth, and education; consumer culture; work and labour history; history of technology; public history.
Research interests: Advertising and marketing to teenagers in 20th century Canada; part-time teenaged work in post-WWII Canada; high school curriculum and consumer studies.
Katharine's research examines the social and cultural influence of corporate entities, from her current work on the economic and social impacts of consumer culture on youth to earlier research on notions of gender, class and community in Canadian company towns.
She holds a PhD in History from the University of Ottawa and an MA in History from the University of Victoria. Previously, she was an L.R. Wilson Assistant Professor at the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University, and a SSHRC post-doctoral scholar. You can follow her on Twitter: @KTRollwagen.
Selected articles and book chapters:
- “Classrooms for Consumer Society: Practical Education and Secondary School Reform in Post-Second World War Canada,” Historical Studies in Education, 28:1 (Spring 2016): 32-52.
- “Eaton's Goes to School: Youth councils and the Commodification of the Teenaged Consumer at Canada's Largest Department Store, 1940-1960,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, 47:95 (November 2014): 683-703.
- Chad Gaffield, Byron Moldofsky, and Katharine Rollwagen, “'Do not use for comparison with other censuses': Identity, Politics and Languages Commonly Spoken in 1911 Canada,” in The Dawn of “Canada's Century”: Hidden Histories (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014). pp. 93-123.
- “When Ghosts Hovered: Community and Crisis in a Company Town, Britannia Beach, British Columbia, Canada, 1957-1965,” in Marcelo J. Borges and Susana B. Torres, eds., Company Towns: Labour, Space, and Power Relations across Time and Continents (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). pp. 151-180.
Recent conference presentations:
- “Canadian television is still in its infancy”: Childhood, Media Regulation, and the Fowler Commission.” Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting. Calgary, AB. 31 May 2016.
- “The Young Medium: Regulating Television in the Name of Canadian Childhood.” Child and Teen Consumption Conference. Aalborg, Denmark. 27 April 2016.
- “A Classroom for Consumer Society: 'Practical Education,' Part-time Jobs, and Secondary School Reform in Canada's First Post-WWII Decade.” Society for the History of Childhood and Youth Conference. Vancouver, BC. 25 June 2015.
- “Roundtable – What does an Interdisciplinary Classroom Look Like?” with John Bonnett, Patrizia Gentile, Steven High, and Jo-Anne McCutcheon. Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting. Ottawa, ON. 3 June 2015.
- “Constructing the Student-consumer: Expert Discourses on Consumer Education and the After-school Job in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada.” Child and Teen Consumption Conference. Edinburgh, Scotland. 10 April 2014.
- “On the Edge of Adulthood: Age Consciousness and Teenaged Dependency in Canada's Decennial Censuses, 1921-1951.” Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting. Victoria, BC, 3-5 June 2013.