Courtesy Calvin College

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the Director of the John Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity. She is the lead researcher and author of For A New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, an Institute for American Values-led report that New York Times columnist David Brooks called "one of the most important think tank reports" of 2008. With David Blankenhorn and Sorcha Brophy Warren she co-edited Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue (Templeton Press 2009). For the next few years, she will be exploring how families can get out of debt and build assets.

Dr. Whitehead was a co-director of Rutgers' National Marriage Project for nine years and has written widely on marriage, divorce, contemporary courtship and child well-being for such publications as the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Her books include: The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and the Family (Knopf, 1997) and Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman (Broadway Books, 2003).

Whitehead received a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin and attended Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She attended the University of Chicago on a Ford Foundation Fellowship and received an MA and PhD in American history.