Warwick Anderson is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. His books include The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne 2002; Durham, NC, 2006); Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006; Ateneo de Manila 2007); The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore, 2008); and (with Ian R. Mackay) Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Baltimore, 2014).
Carlos Aramayo is the Financial Secretary-Treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 26, the union for hospitality workers in the greater Boston area. During his eleven years with UNITE HERE he has organized hotel and industrial food service workers in Connecticut, Nevada, Florida, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. As organizing director of UNITE HERE Local 26 from 2011 to 2016, he led successful campaigns to double the size of the union. He first became involved with the labor movement as a rank-and-file organizer with the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Latin American history.
Rudi Batzell is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard working on U.S economic and social history in a global and comparative framework. He is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “Reconstructing Global Capitalism: Class, Corporations, and the Rise of Welfare States, 1870–1930.” This project examines households, firms, collective action, and state formation in four cities: the steel centers of Pittsburgh and Sheffield, and the transportation hubs of Baltimore and Liverpool. Tracing the reconstruction of proprietary capitalism into corporate capitalism across the political economy, the project challenges narratives of exceptionalism in both American and British historiography. He has published in Past & Present on labor, migration, and racist politics in 1870s California.
Lindsey Dayton is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Columbia University. Her dissertation, “Union House: The Politics of Service Worker Organizing in the Twentieth Century,” excavates the history of hotel union strategies to combat racialized gender hierarchies in the service industry through seismic shifts in social reproductive labor, capital formation, and conceptions of workplace rights between the 1890s and the early 2000s. She was a founder of the Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC-UAW) and has worked as an organizer and server in the hospitality industry.
Leon Fink is UIC Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also edits the journal, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas. A specialist in labor and immigration history, he is the author or editor of a dozen books, including, most recently, The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Promise of a New World Order (Philadelphia 2015); Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (Champaign 2014); Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill 2011); and The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill 2003). A Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Senior Scholar, and past NEH Fellow, Professor Fink spent the early half of 2015 as Guest of the Director at the Re:work Research Institute, Humboldt University, Berlin, January–July 2015, developing a new project on global labor relations in the post-World War Two years.
Georgette Fleischer earned a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2002), shortly before the first major attempt there to organize graduate student workers fell apart and the Brown University (2004) decision seemed to foreclose that possibility. Since then, she has taught as an adjunct at Columbia University and Barnard College, where she spearheaded the formation of Barnard Contingent Faculty-United Auto Workers Local 2110. In August–September 2016 she served as a delegate to the UAW's Region 9A Leadership Conference in Hyannis, Massachusetts, during which she participated in a panel on Academic Labor alongside graduate student workers organizing at Harvard University and Columbia. Though trained as a modernist, with publications on Djuna Barnes and women writers’ responses to national socialism and World War Two, at present Dr. Fleischer most enjoys teaching a Comp. Lit. course that focuses on the later nineteenth-century European novel, read through Georg Lukács. She is writing a memoir about her late father, a mathematician.
Justin F. Jackson is Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in Global Histories at the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University, where his teaching focuses on global and American history, the comparative history of modern empires, and the history of capitalism and labor. His research has appeared in the journal Labor: Working-Class Studies of the Americas and in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery, ed. Magaly Rodríguez and Marcel van der Linden (Leiden, 2016). His book manuscript, The Work of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Making of American Colonialisms in Cuba and the Philippines, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press.
Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Lecturer in Australian History at the University of Sydney. Her research traces the history of the Chinese diaspora in Australia and the wider Pacific region. In doing so, she retrieves the nonwestern narratives that accompanied the creation of the modern Australian state. Her first book, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China, has recently been published by Routledge and followed Chinese Australian return migration to Shanghai in the twentieth century. She is conducting new research into labor history by examining Chinese indentured laborers in colonial Australia in the nineteenth century. Her work has been published in the History Workshop Journal and the Journal of Contemporary History.
Julia Martínez is Associate Professor in History and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on migration and labor history in transnational contexts. Current projects include a study of the trafficking of women in Southeast Asia and Australia; a transcolonial history of domestic service with Claire Lowrie, Victoria Haskins, and Frances Steel; an edited collection with Kate Bagnall on Chinese women in Australian history; and a history of Indian labor for the North Australian telegraph. Her award-winning monograph (with Adrian Vickers) is The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia's Northern Trading Network (Honolulu, 2015). In 2015 she was a fellow at the University of Leiden, holding a joint grant from the International Institute for Asian Studies and the African Studies Center.
Wendy Matsumura is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at UC San Diego. Her works include The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor and Theorizations of Community (Durham, NC, 2015) and “The Expansion of the Japanese Empire and the Rise of the Global Agrarian Question after the First World War” in Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics ed. Alexander Anievas (Leiden, 2016). Her current work examines the history of Japanese fascism through social reproduction theory. She has also written short analyses of contemporary Okinawan politics for The Jacobin and The Funambulist.
Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University, is a political and legal historian who is interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Boston and New York, 2010), which has been published in Chinese translation in both China and Taiwan. She has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, among others. She is now working on The Chinese Question (under contract), a comparative study of Chinese gold miners in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and South Africa, which explores the role of diasporic labor in extractive economies in the making of settler-colonial societies, the place of gold in global capitalist development during the late-nineteenth century, and the rise of the “Chinese Question” in global politics. Ngai has been a member of the International Labor and Working-Class History editorial board since 2008.
Nicola Pizzolato is a Lecturer at Middlesex University and an Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests focus on the interplay of race, ethnicity, and culture in labor and political movements. His publications include numerous articles appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals in which he explored the themes of political identity, protest, and social representation of African-Americans and Italian southern migrants in the postwar period examined with a transnational and comparative approach. He is currently working on a monograph on unfree labor during the New Deal in the American and international context. Among his publications: Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (New York, 2013); “Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970),” International Review of Social History 56 (2011): 1–30; “Revolution in a Comic Strip: Gasparazzo and the Identity of Southern Migrants in Turin (1969–1975),” International Review of Social History 52 (2007); “Workers and Revolutionaries at the Twilight of Fordism” in Labor History 45 (2004): 419–43.
Zach Sell is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is completing his dissertation “Slavery Beyond Slavery: The American South, British Imperialism, and the Circuits of Capital, 1833–1873.” His writing has previously appeared in the journals Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques and Salvage and the edited volume The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War (New York, 2016).
