Directors
Michael Denning is Co-Director of the Initiative on Labor and Culture, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale. He is the author of Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (1987); Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (1987); The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997), Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004), and Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2015). He founded the Initiative on Labor and Culture, and directed it from 2004 to 2008.
Jennifer Klein is Co-Director of the Initiative on Labor and Culture, and Professor of History at Yale. Her research spans the fields of labor history, business and economic history, and political economy, and she is affiliated with the History of Medicine & Science, and Women’s Studies Programs. Her publications include For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003), which was awarded the Ellis W. Hawley Prize in Political History/Political Economy from the Organization of American Historians and the Hagley Prize in Business History from the Business History Conference. Writing about the intersection between labor politics and the welfare state, she has written articles on the history of health care policy, Social Security, pensions, collective bargaining and New Deal liberalism, including “The Politics of Economic Security: Employees Benefits and the Privatization of New Deal Liberalism,” published in the Journal of Policy History. Her forthcoming book, Caring for America: Low-Wage Labor in the American Welfare State, co-authored with Eileen Boris, will be published by Oxford University Press. Their articles on home care workers, long-term care, and labor organizing include: “Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State” in Politics and Society (March 2006); “We Were the Invisible Workforce: Unionizing Home Care,” in The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor, ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble (ILR/Cornell Press, 2007); and “Laws of Care: The Supreme Court and Aides to Elderly People” in Dissent (Fall 2007). She is also on the Editorial Board of International Labor and Working-Class History, and edited its special issue, “The Politics of Privatization: Global Perspectives on the Privatization of Public Workers, Land, and Services” (Spring 2007).
Affiliates
Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Associate Professor of American Studies and has served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University. Her current scholarship centers on migration and violence at the US-Mexico border as a departure point for conceptualizing the uneven processes of capitalist development and globalization. Her other scholarship in comparative ethnic and gender studies examines the relationship of labor and social movements to vernacular cultural production in the western hemisphere. She is the author of Migrant Dreams: Development and Subalternity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, forthcoming from NYU Press. Her essay “Borders of Solidarity: Race and Gender Contradictions in Transnational Labor Movements” appeared in the journal Social Justice in 1999.
José Celso de Castro Alves was the Initiative’s first Project Assistant. He is presently an assistant professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College, and is working on a book about social movements in early nineteenth-century Brazil. He co-authored with Antony Dugdale and J. J. Fuser, Yale, Slavery and Abolition (New Haven: The Amistad Committee, 2001).
David Montgomery (1927-2011) was the Farnan Professor of History at Yale University. Past-President of the Organization of American Historians, Professor Montgomery worked for ten years as a machinist in New York and the Twin Cities, and was an active member of the IAM, the UE, and the Teamsters during those years. His was the author of many books and articles dealing with the history and current prospects of working people in the United States, and for many years he edited the journal International Labor and Working-Class History. His best known books are The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination, 1988), Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (1993), Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1979), Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967), and Black Workers’ Struggle for Equality in Birmingham (2004), written in collaboration with Professor Horace Huntley of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
Stephen J. Pitti is Associate Professor of History and American Studies. He is the author of several articles on Chicana/o history and Mexican immigration as well as The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (2003). He teaches graduate seminars on the history of Latinos, comparative civil rights movements, and race relations in the American West, and he is currently at work on a biography of Cesar Chavez and on a study of deportations and repatriations from California.
J, Jesse Ramírez served as a Project Assistant for the Initiative. He received his PhD in American Studies at Yale, and currently teaches at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe Universityin Frankfurt.
Kirsten Weld served as the Initiative’s Project Assistant for Community Relations. She received her PHD in History from Yale University, and is currently an assistant professor of history at Harvard University.