Hilary Levey Friedman, PhD, is the author of Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America and Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. She is part of the Department of Education at Brown University, where she teaches courses on topics like afterschool activities, sports, and qualitative methods. She also was a Fellow at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Society, though she is now a JD Candidate (2024) at the Roger Williams University School of Law.
Dr. Levey Friedman is a member of the Ward 2 Committee in Providence. She has served as President of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women (RI NOW), been a member of the Public Policy Committee of the United Way of Rhode Island, the Platform and Issues Committee of the Rhode Island Democratic Party, and served as a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA).
Prof. Levey Friedman grew up in the suburbs of Detroit where she graduated from Marian High School. As an undergraduate at Harvard she discovered sociology, graduating magna cum laude with highest honors in 2002 and writing her honors thesis on child beauty pageants. She then earned an MPhil from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences as a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where her dissertation was about fashion and national identity. Following her time in England Prof. Levey Friedman matriculated at Princeton University, from which she earned a PhD in Sociology in 2009 as both a Spencer Dissertation Fellow and as a Harold W. Dodds fellow. During graduate school her research focused on competitive after-school activities (chess, dance, Kumon enrichment classes, and soccer). Prof. Levey Friedman completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University quantitatively studying youth sports injuries, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The mother of a second grader and a fourth grader, she spends whatever spare time she has reading (anything and everything!) and watching a variety of (reality) television shows and documentaries.
