Hilary Levey Friedman
Hilary grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan 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 she 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), children’s work, and university commencement speakers. Hilary recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University quantitatively studying youth sports injuries, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She also completed a book manuscript (under contract with the University of California Press) entitled Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is pursuing writing full-time as a sociologist and freelance writer.
