Mimi Abramovitz
Fellow, Social Work, Hunter College
Mimi Abramovitz is Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. She has published widely on issues related to women, poverty, human rights and the U.S Welfare State.
Mimi Abramovitz
Mimi Abramovitz is Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. She has published widely on issues related to women, poverty, human rights and the U.S Welfare State. Professor Abramovitz is currently writing a book on the history of low-income women’s activism in the U.S. Her previous books include the award-winning Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the U.S., Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present, The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy and Taxes Are A Woman’s Issue: Reframing the Debate. She has also published more than 80 articles in scholarly and popular journals. Among her honors and awards, Dr. Abramovitz has been inducted into the Columbia University School of Social Work Hall of Fame.
Working Group Affiliation
Rebecca Adami
Fellow, International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London
Dr. Rebecca Adami, PhD is currently Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies). Former Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Arts and Humanities, Teachers College as well as at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University.
Her post doc project titled “Women of the De
Rebecca Adami
Research Associate, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London
Dr. Rebecca Adami, PhD is currently Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies). Former Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Arts and Humanities, Teachers College as well as at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University.
Her post doc project titled “Women of the Declaration: Exploring Counternarratives on Human Rights from 1946-48” centers on the UN female delegates who where part of drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Her research interest is on the broad study of human rights in the field of philosophy of education. In her PhD thesis, titled “Human Rights Learning: the Significance of Narratives, Relationality and Uniqueness”, Dr Adami explored human rights learning through a narrative turn that focus on learners and teachers life stories, drawing on the work of Hanna Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. Her published work includes articles such as “Re-Thinking Relations in Human Rights Education: The Politics of Narratives.” in Journal of Philosophy of Education and “Towards Cosmopolitan Ethics in Teacher Education: An Ontological Dimension of Learning Human Rights”, in Ethics and Education. Dr Adami has taught university courses for teacher students on multiculturalism and diversity at the Department of Education, Stockholm University.
Working Group Affiliation
George Aumoithe
PhD Student, History, Bowdoin College
George Aumoithe focuses on 20th century American history and the history of public health, science, and medicine. He received his B.A. from Bowdoin College with a double major in history and Africana studies and a minor in gay and lesbian studies. His studies were supported by the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Point Foundation , the national LGBTQ scholarship.
George Aumoithe
PhD Student, Columbia University
George Aumoithe focuses on 20th century American history and the history of public health, science, and medicine. He received his B.A. from Bowdoin College with a double major in history and Africana studies and a minor in gay and lesbian studies. His studies were supported by the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Point Foundation , the national LGBTQ scholarship. His work examines the politics of patient advocacy, lay expertise, and clinical medicine as it pertains to HIV and AIDS.
In his spare time, George volunteers for Columbia Health's Gay Health Advocacy Project and sings Bass 1 as part of the New York City Master Chorale.
Working Group Affiliation
Volker Berghahn
Professor, Department of History, Columbia University
Volker Berghahn specializes in modern German history and European-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1961) and his Ph.D. from the University of London (1964). His publications include: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); and Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006).
Volker Berghahn
Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
Volker Berghahn specializes in modern German history and European-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1961) and his Ph.D. from the University of London (1964). He taught in England and Germany before coming to Brown University in 1988 and to Columbia ten years later. His publications include: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971); Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006); and most recently Industriegesellschaft und Kulturtransfer, Goettingen (2010).
Working Group Affiliation
Sheri Berman
Professor, Department of Political Science, Barnard College
Sheri E. Berman is professor of political science. Her main interests are European politics and political history, democracy and democratization, globalization, and the history of the left. Her two books, The Social Democratic Moment; Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe and The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century have examined the role played by social democracy in determining political outcomes in 20th-century Europe. Her book Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From Ancien Regime to the Present Day is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Sheri Berman
Professor of Political Science, Barnard College
Sheri E. Berman is professor of political science. Her main interests are European politics and political history, democracy and democratization, globalization, and the history of the left. Her two books, The Social Democratic Moment; Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe and The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century have examined the role played by social democracy in determining political outcomes in 20th-century Europe. Her book Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From Ancien Regime to the Present Day is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Working Group Affiliation
Lindsey Dayton
PhD Student, History, Lawrence College
Lindsey Dayton is a second-year PhD student in the field of U.S. History, focusing on African American, gender, and labor history in the 20th century. She received a BA in liberal arts and an MA in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Her MA thesis, “From Heavy Iron Blues to I Pay my Union Dues,” explored black women laundry workers’ successful efforts to organize a union in New York City during the Great Depression.
Lindsey Dayton
PhD Student, History
Lindsey Dayton is a second-year PhD student in the field of U.S. History, focusing on African American, gender, and labor history in the 20th century. She received a BA in liberal arts and an MA in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Her MA thesis, “From Heavy Iron Blues to I Pay my Union Dues,” explored black women laundry workers’ successful efforts to organize a union in New York City during the Great Depression. After completing her master’s degree she worked in the hospitality industry in Chicago and was active in organizing hotel, restaurant, and food service workers there and in New York. Research interests include the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality in the organizing of black women in the urban north; the history of the radical left and leftist coalitions; and the impact of migration and immigration on black protest politics around issues of labor. She is currently researching domestic worker organizing in Manhattan and Brooklyn during the Great Depression.
Working Group Affiliation
Deborah Dinner
Fellow, Law History, Emory
Deborah Dinner is a legal historian whose scholarship examines the interaction between social movements, political culture, and legal change. Dinner’s research focuses in particular on how law responds to vulnerabilities that derive from familial and employment relationships, at home and at work. Her courses and curricular interests include Property, the Fourteenth Amendment, Family Law, Employment Discrimination, and Legal History.
Deborah Dinner
Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Deborah Dinner is a legal historian whose scholarship examines the interaction between social movements, political culture, and legal change. Dinner’s research focuses in particular on how law responds to vulnerabilities that derive from familial and employment relationships, at home and at work. Her courses and curricular interests include Property, the Fourteenth Amendment, Family Law, Employment Discrimination, and Legal History.
Dinner’s book-in-progress Contested Labor: Gender and the Law in Neoliberal America(forthcoming Cambridge University Press)examines debates about the meaning of sex equality in the late twentieth century. The book argues that neoliberal ideology, the rise of the New Right, and the transition from an industrial to a service economy foreclosed feminists’ efforts to achieve greater state protection for workers and caregivers, even as women made significant strides toward equal employment opportunity. Dinner’s most recent article “Beyond ‘Best Practices’: Employment Discrimination in the Neoliberal Era,” published in the Indiana Law Journal, shows that the rise of antidiscrimination ideals in the late twentieth century was intertwined with the deregulation of labor and with cutbacks in the welfare state. Her article “The Divorce Bargain: The Fathers’ Rights Movement and Family Inequalities” offers the first legal history of the fathers’ rights movement and analyzes its consequences for class-differentiated experiences of fatherhood. The article was selected for presentation at the 2014 Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and was published by Virginia Law Review in 2016. Dinner has published several other articles on the legal history of gender, work, and the welfare state in the Washington University Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, and Law & History Review.
Dinner joined Emory in 2015, after serving as an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Dinner earned her JD and PhD in history at Yale. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Karen Nelson Moore of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and served as the Raoul Berger–Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard University and the Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.
Working Group Affiliation
Yasmine Ergas
Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Yasmine Ergas is Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy, Lecturer in International and Public Affairs, and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. A lawyer and sociologist, she has worked on issues regarding gender and women’s rights as a policy analyst and advisor, scholar and advocate. She has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations, including the OECD, UNESCO, the Millennium Villages Project, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and CENSIS, a major applied social research institute in Italy, and been on the staff of the Social Science Research Council.
Yasmine Ergas
Professor, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Yasmine Ergas is Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy, Lecturer in International and Public Affairs, and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. A lawyer and sociologist, she has worked on issues regarding gender and women’s rights as a policy analyst and advisor, scholar and advocate. She has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations, including the OECD, UNESCO, the Millennium Villages Project, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and CENSIS, a major applied social research institute in Italy, and been on the staff of the Social Science Research Council. Her recent work has focused on the emergence of an international market in reproductive services, the transformations of ‘motherhood’ and the impacts of human rights programs and policies. Previous relevant work centered on feminist movements and their interactions with public policies; the implications of the concept of ‘gender’ for feminist politics; child care policies in international and comparative perspective; educational policies and the social implications of HIV/AIDS.
Working Group Affiliations
Melissa Fisher
New York
Melissa Fisher
Visiting Scholar, New York University Institute for Public Knowledge
New York
Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist, is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and a Principal Research Fellow at the Conference Board. She is also an adjunct professor in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her first book, a co-edited volume, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006), explored the social and cultural landscape of business. Wall Street Women (Duke Press, 2012), her second book, examines the first generation of women in finance (1956-2010). Her current book project is on the future of work in the wake of social movements (such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter) as well as crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
Melissa has given numerous key notes talks nationally and internationally. Her book on Wall Street women received over 25 reviews in academic journals. In addition, her research has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNBC, NPR and the BBC. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Bloomberg and Bill Moyer’s Group Think. She appeared in the 2014 PBS documentary Makers: Women in Business. She also played an advisory role in the first female financial thriller film, Equity, a 2016 Sony Classic Pictures release. She is currently a US Delegate to the Women’s 20 that advises the G20 on gender issues.
Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia, Melissa was the Laurits Andersen Professor in Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has also been a faculty member in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology at Columbia University and her B.A. in English at Barnard College.
Working Group Affiliation
Irwin Garfinkel
Professor, Department of Contemporary Urban Problems, Columbia School of Social Work
Irwin Garfinkel is the co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC). Of the 37 population research centers funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), CPRC is the only one to have been founded within a school of social work. Its signature area is children, youth, and families. A social worker and an economist by training, he has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific articles and 16 books, including, most recently, Wealth and Welfare States: Is America Laggard or Leader?
Irwin Garfinkel
Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems, Columbia School of Social Work
Irwin Garfinkel is the co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC). Of the 37 population research centers funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), CPRC is the only one to have been founded within a school of social work. Its signature area is children, youth, and families. Previously, Professor Garfinkel was the director of the Institute for Research on Poverty (1975-1980) and the School of Social Work (1982-1984) at the University of Wisconsin.
Between 1980 and 1990, he was the principal investigator of the Wisconsin child support study. His research on child support and welfare influenced legislation in Wisconsin and other American states, the U.S. Congress, Great Britain, Australia, and Sweden.
In 1996, Professor Garfinkel, in conjunction with his wife, Sara McLanahan, the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. initiated the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Nearly 5,000 children in 20 large American cities were enrolled in the study at birth and are now adolescents. A recent study found that harsh parenting increased in the wake of the Great Recession.
Professor Garfinkel received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. A social worker and an economist by training, he has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific articles and 16 books and edited volumes on poverty, income transfers, program evaluation, single parent families and child support, and the welfare state, including, most recently, Wealth and Welfare States: Is America Laggard or Leader?
Working Group Affiliation
Linda Gordon
Fellow, History, New York University
Linda Gordon is a professor of history and a University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Her early books focused on the historical roots of social policy issues, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. More recently, she has explored other ways of presenting history to a broad audience, publishing the microhistory The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction(Harvard University Press, 1999) and the biography Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (W.W. Norton, 2009), both of which won the Bancroft Prize. She is one of only three historians to have won this award twice.
Linda Gordon
Department of History, New York University
Linda Gordon is a professor of history and a University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Her early books focused on the historical roots of social policy issues, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. More recently, she has explored other ways of presenting history to a broad audience, publishing the microhistory The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction(Harvard University Press, 1999) and the biography Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (W.W. Norton, 2009), both of which won the Bancroft Prize. She is one of only three historians to have won this award twice.
Gordon is writing about social movements in the 20th-century United States, including not only progressive movements such as the New Left and the women's liberation movement, but also right-wing movements such as the Ku Klux Klan. She is also examining New Deal (1930s) artists and photographers as part of an artistic social movement, considering the contributions and limitations of art that attempts to support social justice.
Gordon holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Yale University. She has won many prizes and fellowships, including the Albert J. Beveridge Award for best history book on any part of the Americas, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in biography; American Council of Learned Societies, Bunting Institute, and Guggenheim fellowships; and a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health for her work on family violence.
Working Group Affiliation
Anna Danziger Halperin
PhD Student, History, Columbia University
Anna Danziger Halperin studies twentieth century American and British social policy and its effects on women and children, with a particular interest in child care. She graduated from Barnard College in 2006 with a degree in History and Human Rights. Before returning to Columbia in 2010, Anna conducted research and coauthored several reports on U.S. child care policies and other related issues affecting low-wage working families during her employment with the Urban Institute and the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
Anna Danziger Halperin
PhD Student, History
Anna Danziger Halperin studies twentieth century American and British social policy and its effects on women and children, with a particular interest in child care. She graduated from Barnard College in 2006 with a degree in History and Human Rights. Before returning to Columbia in 2010, Anna conducted research and coauthored several reports on U.S. child care policies and other related issues affecting low-wage working families during her employment with the Urban Institute and the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
Working Group Affiliation
Nick Juravich
Doctoral Student, Education, Columbia University
Nick Juravich is a doctoral student in United States History, studying education, labor organizing, social policy, urban history, and social movements in the twentieth century. His dissertation, provisionally titled "An Education in Democracy: Paraprofessionals in Schools, Communities, and the Labor Movement, 1965-1980," examines the changing relationships between public schools, local communities, and public sector unions in this era.
Nick Juravich
Nick Juravich is a doctoral student in United States History, studying education, labor organizing, social policy, urban history, and social movements in the twentieth century. His dissertation, provisionally titled "An Education in Democracy: Paraprofessionals in Schools, Communities, and the Labor Movement, 1965-1980," examines the changing relationships between public schools, local communities, and public sector unions in this era.
Nick received his BA in History with honors from the University of Chicago in 2006, where he wrote his senior thesis on the Rainbow Beach Wade-Ins, a series of civil rights protests in Chicago that Nick helped to commemorate for their 50th Anniversary in 2011. From 2006 to 2008, Nick attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History with distinction for his master's thesis on the transnational origins of black British equality movements. His research at Columbia is funded by Javits Fellowship.
Nick lives in Crown Heights, where he ran around schoolyards with kids as a health and fitness educator for New York Road Runners for two years before coming to Columbia, and where he still blogs about neighborhood change and local issues at http://ilovefranklinave.blogspot.com . His essays and reviews have appeared online for the New York Observer, the New York Moon, the Huffington Post, Tropics of Meta, and Dissent.
Working Group Affiliation
Suzanne Kahn
PhD Student, History, Columbia University
Suzanne Kahn is a Ph.D. candidate in the U.S. History program. She works at the intersection of legal history, women’s history, and American Political Development. Her dissertation, “Divorce and the Politics of the Social Welfare Regime, 1969-2001,” examines how rising divorce rates shaped the politics and policies around women’s access to economic resources.
Suzanne Kahn
PhD Student, History
Suzanne Kahn is a Ph.D. candidate in the U.S. History program. She works at the intersection of legal history, women’s history, and American Political Development. Her dissertation, “Divorce and the Politics of the Social Welfare Regime, 1969-2001,” examines how rising divorce rates shaped the politics and policies around women’s access to economic resources.
Suzanne’s research has been supported by fellowships from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2013, she was fellow at the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Suzanne received her B.A. with honors in history from Yale University in 2007. Before returning to graduate school she worked on the Service Employees International Union’s campaign for health care reform.
Working Group Affiliation
Alice Kessler-Harris
Professor, Department of American History, Columbia University
Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History. She is also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Dr. Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender. She received her B. A. from Goucher College (1961) and her Ph.D. from Rutgers (1968). Her most recent published works include: In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001) and A Difficult Woman: The Challening Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012).
Alice Kessler-Harris
R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History Emerita, Columbia University
Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History and a Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Dr. Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender. She received her B. A. from Goucher College (1961) and her Ph.D. from Rutgers (1968).
Her published works include: In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001); Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982); A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990); and Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (1981). She is co-editor of Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, Australia, and the United States, 1880-1920 (1995) and U.S. History as Women's History (1995). Some of Kessler-Harris' essays in women's labor history are collected in Gendering Labor History (2007). Her most recent book is A Difficult Woman: The Challening Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012).
Working Group Affiliation
Social Justice After the Welfare State, Project Director
Clara Mattei
Fellow, Economics, The New School for Social Research
Clara Mattei is Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. She holds a PhD jointly from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP) in Pisa, Italy, and Université de Strasbourg, Ecole Doctorale Augustine Cournot in Strasbourg, France, an MA in Philosophy from Pavia, and a BA in Philosophy from Cambridge University. Her research explores a comparative view of post-World War I monetary and fiscal policies and she brings broad interdisciplinary engagements to her work in the history of economic thought and methodology.
Clara Mattei
Economics, The New School for Social Research
Clara Mattei is Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. She holds a PhD jointly from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP) in Pisa, Italy, and Université de Strasbourg, Ecole Doctorale Augustine Cournot in Strasbourg, France, an MA in Philosophy from Pavia, and a BA in Philosophy from Cambridge University. Her research explores a comparative view of post-World War I monetary and fiscal policies and she brings broad interdisciplinary engagements to her work in the history of economic thought and methodology.
Working Group Affiliation
Ruth Milkman
Fellow, Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Ruth Milkman is a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her early research focused on the impact on U.S. women workers of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s. She went on to study the restructuring of the U.S. automobile industry and its impact on workers and their union in the 1980s and 1990s; in that period she also analyzed the labor practices of Japanese-owned factories in California. More recently she has written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. She co-authored a 2013 study of California’s paid family leave program, focusing on its impact on employers and workers.
Ruth Milkman
Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Ruth Milkman is a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her early research focused on the impact on U.S. women workers of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s. She went on to study the restructuring of the U.S. automobile industry and its impact on workers and their union in the 1980s and 1990s; in that period she also analyzed the labor practices of Japanese-owned factories in California. More recently she has written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. She co-authored a 2013 study of California’s paid family leave program, focusing on its impact on employers and workers.
She was elected as the 2016 President of the American Sociological Association, where her presidential address focused on Millennial-generation social movements. She has also conducted extensive policy-oriented research on such topics as wage theft, unionization trends, paid sick leave, and the aging workforce. After 21 years as a sociology professor at UCLA, where she directed the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008, she returned to New York City in 2010. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, where she teaches Labor Studies and also serves as Research Director.
Working Group Affiliation
Jennifer Mittelstadt
Fellow, History, Rutgers University
I am a political historian of the United States writing about women and gender, race, and the state.
Jennifer Mittelstadt
Associate Professor
I am a political historian of the United States writing about women and gender, race, and the state. I specialize in the twentieth century, especially post-World War II, and my interests in politics are quite broad. They include social policy and social politics; liberalism; second-wave feminism; and most recently, the military and militarization. I have published articles and opinion pieces in the Journal of Policy History, International Labor and Working Class History, the Journal of Women’s History, Social Politics, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. I am currently writing a book on the United States Army, social welfare, and politics in the late twentieth century.
Working Group Affiliation
Premilla Nadasen
Professor, Department of History, Barnard College
Premilla Nadasen is professor of history at Barnard College, a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar, and president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color have fought for social justice.
Premilla Nadasen
Professor of History, Barnard Collge
Premilla Nadasen is professor of history at Barnard College, a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar, and president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color have fought for social justice. She is the author of two award-winning books Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005) and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon 2015) and is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba. Nadasen has been engaged with community and campus activism for many years, bridging academic and activist work by making her scholarly work accessible to people outside of the university. She has worked with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Scholars for Social Justice, and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. She writes for both academic and non-academic outlets and speaks widely on issues of social justice, feminism, public policy and anti-racist organizing.
Working Group Affiliations
Social Justice After the Welfare State, Project Director
Transnational Black Feminisms, Project Director
Frances Fox Piven
Fellow, Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center
Before coming to the Graduate Center, Prof. Piven taught at Boston University, Columbia University, New York University Law School, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bologna. She is past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association, has served as program co-chair of the annual political science meetings, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is currently President of the American Sociological Association.
Frances Fox Piven
Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center
Before coming to the Graduate Center, Prof. Piven taught at Boston University, Columbia University, New York University Law School, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bologna. She is past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association, has served as program co-chair of the annual political science meetings, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is currently President of the American Sociological Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the President's Award of the American Public Health Association, and the American Sociological Association's Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, as well as their award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. Her books deal with the development of the welfare state, political movements, urban political, and electoral politics. Among them are REGULATING THE POOR (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award in 1972, and updated in 1993); POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS (1977); THE NEW CLASS WAR (1982; UPDATED 1985); WHY AMERICANS DON'T VOTE (1988); THE MEAN SEASON (1987); LABOR PARTIES IN POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES (1992); THE BREAKING OF THE AMERICAN SOCIAL COMPACT (1997); WHY AMERICANS STILL DON'T VOTE (2000); and THE WAR AT HOME (2004); Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006).
Working Group Affiliation