Charlie Super learned early in life that people in different places behave differently. He grew up in suburban New Jersey, but spent many summers with his mother’s parents in rural Georgia. His father, though American-born, grew up in Europe; Charlie had his own taste of Europe as a teenager, when the family spent a year in Paris.
After undergraduate education in conventional psychology at Yale, and graduate training in developmental psychology at Harvard’s interdisciplinary Social Relations department, Charlie thought he knew a great deal about the development of American children, but was unsure how much of that was relevant to children in other places; he wanted to live and work for an extended period in someplace very different. In the meantime, he had discovered True Love. He and Sara Harkness were married not long before she needed to do field work for her doctorate in Anthropology. The cooperative exchange program between Harvard and the University of Nairobi offered a perfect opportunity for both of them. With support from the Carnegie and W. T. Grant foundations, Charlie and Sara moved to a farming community in western Kenya. They lived there for three years and started their family among the Kipsigis peoples of Kokwet.
Returning to the U.S. offered many opportunities, but not academic jobs. Cambridge proved a good base for research grants, short-term teaching, consulting, and raising children in an urban, family-friendly environment. It also offered a window to re-engage in applied work; a stint working for the 1970 White House Conference on Children during graduate school had sharpened Charlie’s understanding of the need for scientifically informed interventions, and the time in rural Kenya had only expanded on that. In these Cambridge years, he worked with two large intervention programs for infant and child health, in Bangladesh and in Colombia, and completed the necessary training for licensure as a child-clinical psychologist.
The Harkness-Super family moved to Penn State in 1988 when both Charlie and Sara were offered tenured positions, Charlie as Head of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. In addition to initiation into academic administration and Land Grant values, central Pennsylvania also offered a remarkable clinical experience. State College, home to the university, is “centrally isolated”, as the locals say, smack in the middle of Appalachia. As the only doctoral-level child clinician in a four-county area, he saw a range of mental suffering and resilience unavailable in a Boston practice, everything from infant sleep problems to childhood dissociative identity disorder. There was also more field work, this time in the Netherlands, and now as a family journey. It was a period of ethnographic discovery and intellectual adventure, setting the stage for a return visit four years later.
At the end of that second work in the Netherlands, Charlie and Sara accepted offers from the University of Connecticut. Charlie came as Dean of the School of Family Studies, and this presented an opportunity to advance his ideas on a culturally informed curriculum in the context of an institutional history that appreciated the interplay of theory and practice. For him, this combined the interdisciplinary vision of Social Relations and the use of knowledge exemplified in the Land Grant tradition. Over the next decade, HDFS became the largest undergraduate major at UConn, increased research funding six-fold, and established two research and outreach Centers, a student Writing Center, HDFS’s first high-tech seminar room, the “Grad Lab,” and Lu’s Café. When the University reorganized in 2006, eliminating three Colleges, HDFS became a department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Charlie returned to the faculty.
Research and writing have always been a vital part of Charlie’s academic life; in 2009 he and Sara shared the Society for Research in Child Development’s inaugural award for Cultural and Contextual Factors in Child Development. The Kenyan work produced the Developmental Niche framework for understanding culture’s role in shaping child development, as well as multiple examples. Research on parental ethnotheories, started in Cambridge, came to fruition in the Dutch fieldwork and its sequel, the International Study of Parents Children and Schools, which explored variation within Europe and its diaspora, working with colleagues from sites in Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, and the U.S. A further follow-up – the International Baby Study –advanced our understanding of how differences in the developmental niche in samples of U.S. and Dutch infants led to dramatic differences in sleep and the related biology of arousal. A book specifically on parental ethnotheories (edited by Harkness and Super) brought the niche framework to a broad audience of developmentalists and psychological anthropologists. The concepts are now widely used in research on culture and child development.
The importance of action continues as a theme in Charlie’s academic and personal life. Through the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development, Charlie helps oversee the National Family Development Credential Program, a nation-wide training that annually certifies about 1,000 front-line family workers in supportive and empowerment skills. He is Principal Investigator on a series of contracts with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood to provide evaluations of this and other interventions. On the leadership front, he has recently rotated off eight years of service on the U.S. National Committee for Psychological Science, organized by the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences. In that role he co-organized two national conferences on the issues facing the discipline in a globalizing world.
Outside his professional life, Charlie served as chair of the Woodstock Democratic Town Committee for 14 years, enjoys being a husband, father, and grandfather, and occasionally plays ragtime piano.
Congratulations to Marlene Schwartz who received a grant from the USDA, “Developing and Implementing a Farm-to-School Policy and Practice Assessment.” The purpose of this project is to develop an assessment of farm to school procurement, education, and community engagement practices in school districts throughout the state. This information will be used by UConn Extension to provide tailored professional development to schools to support stronger relationships between schools and local farmers.
Laura Donorfio’s HDFS 4007W’s project to offer a career closet was featured in UConn Today 
Congratulations to Candi Nwakasi, who was awarded a grant from the Office of Global Affairs, “Mental health support seeking among Nigerians with a history of cancer and HIV!
Caroline Mavridis is an Assistant Research Professor of HDFS and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development (CHHD). Her work includes research, evaluations of social intervention programs in Connecticut, supervising graduate and undergraduate research assistants in the CHHD, and training front-line human service workers. Caroline’s research interests are twofold: 1) the role of culture in parenting ideas and practices, and its implications for children’s developmental outcomes; and 2) experiences of stress, self-care, and well-being among caregivers.
Professor Keith Bellizzi was featured in UConn Today in an article about his work on a new study of communication and intimacy among couples facing metastatic breast cancer: