Negotiating a Changing World: 1920-1950

Alice Kessler-Harris is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History Emerita at Columbia University where she was also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Professor Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and 20th-century social policy. Her books include In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001), which won the Bancroft, Taft, Joan Kelly, and Herbert Hoover prizes; Gendering Labor History (2007), which contains her essays on women, work and social policy, the recently re-issued A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990), and A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012). She is perhaps best known for the classic Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982, 2001). This course is based in part on the second edition of Kessler-Harris’ 1981 book, Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History, published in 2018. Professor Kessler-Harris is past president of the Organization of American Historians, the Labor and Working Class History Association, and the American Studies Association. Currently, she serves as Vice President of the Society of American Historians. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Nick Juravich earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2017 and currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at New-York Historical Society. Beginning in September 2019, he will be an assistant professor of public and labor history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Nick's first book, The Work of Education: Community-Based Educators in Schools, Communities, and the Labor Movement is under advance contract with University of Illinois Press in the Working Class in American History series. Nick is a trained oral history researcher and first interviewed Professor Kessler-Harris for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia's 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.

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