Editor’s note: This is the eleventh entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Aimee Loiselle (@LoiselleAim on Twitter) is a historian of the modern U.S. as a hub for transnational labor and capital with an interest in working women, gender, and race. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position? How long have you worked there and is this your first connection with the organization?
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow for the Reproductive Justice History in Action Project with the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. I am halfway through my three-year appointment, and it is my first connection with Smith.
Tell our readers what a typical day or work-week is like for you. For starters, is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
This postdoc involves researching and writing for an institution’s project, so my typical week encompasses the assignments related to its objectives.1 The RJ History Project is a digital toolkit that presents a long history of U.S. reproductive justice issues over 500 years. Women of color developed the RJ framework in the 1990s, but the issues regarding women’s bodily autonomy, reproduction, gender norms, parenting, and access to safety and healthcare span all of U.S. history. There are two fellows, and we meet as the content team with the project director every week. At the meeting, we discuss our research and writing for the previous week and plan for the next. We also design the overall narrative arc for the project’s eventual website and links between chapters within specific units like “Surviving Enslavement” or “Building a Welfare State.”
The original plan was to use the archives of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College as much as possible, while also searching available online archives and engaging with the secondary literature on each topic. In March 2020, Smith closed the archives due to the pandemic. We have continued our research with available books and online primary sources while using the Sophia Smith Collection finding aids to make note of what we want to find as soon as it reopens. The college has also been constructing a new Nielson Library over the past three years and plans to move all the materials into this location in the summer of 2021–so we cannot access the archives until the fall.
Prior to the pandemic, I went to campus two or three days a week to pick up books, read in the archives, or work in my office. Since the pandemic, I work in my home office, reading, taking notes, searching online for materials, and writing. I find I truly miss the library and all it offers. I have spent my entire life going to libraries. The archives, while quiet, no longer appear quite as solitary as they did before the pandemic and the closures.
You have our attention: tell us more about the Reproductive Justice History in Action Project. Is it live and if not, when will it be?
The RJ History Project formally advanced with a large grant awarded to Smith about seven years ago. That launched the Gloria Steinem Initiative, which Steinem did not fund but supported with her name and time. In 2015 and 2016, she helped to oversee the Gloria and Wilma School for Organizers, also named for Wilma Mankiller, a champion of indigenous peoples’ rights and the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. It convened “activists to advance specific history-into-action projects, explore the origins of their movements, and share their expertise with each other.”
This RJ History Project along with a digital toolkit for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) are parallel ventures that emerged from the Steinem Initiative. The RJ Project is funded by an outside donor who also supports the NDWA History Project. Both the RJ and NDWA teams aim to make history an accessible, productive, and exciting tool for women’s organizing and political-economic actions. Smith has committed to such “history-into-action partnerships of scholars and activists” that integrate lessons from women’s past into current issue campaigns and strategy development.
After several years of planning, which included pursuing and gathering more papers from individuals and organizations for the Sophia Smith Collection, the RJ History Project director hired two fellows to do the content development and writing. We will produce an RJ history that covers 500 years of U.S. history. Women activists developed the RJ framework in the 1990s as they questioned the “reproductive rights” approach of many national and moderate feminist organizations. That approach emphasizes the legal right to birth control and abortion healthcare without challenging the economic obstacles to such healthcare for low-income women; addressing the coercive ways birth control and sterilization have been pushed onto women of color and women with disabilities; or raising larger issues of reproductive labor and childrearing such as environmental contamination, food insecurity, indigenous land rights, and housing.
I research and write approximately 1200-word chapters in accessible language on such topics across U.S. history. Each chapter must have at least four possible images, and the director hired a consultant to do the permissions so we do not have to track them down. I have written chapters on Wampanoag women’s role in their pre-contact communities and the impact of English settlement in the early 1600s; the different strategies of enslaved midwives on British Caribbean sugar plantations vs. cotton plantations in the British and then U.S. South in the 1700s and 1800s; the formation of Asian American women’s domestic violence shelters in the 1980s; and recent efforts by Georgia WAND to demand regulation and oversight of a new nuclear power plant near a rural African American community with high rates of cancers. At this stage, we plan for the RJ History website to go live in the spring of 2022.
Display case at Alamance Community College (Graham, NC) outside the room of the Crystal Lee Sutton Archives.
Have you always been interested in history? If so, what’s your earliest memory about a historical topic or event?
My interest in history grew from my love of reading. In elementary school, I began reading more advanced books that included literature from many time periods and novels in different historical settings. The first time I took notice of my history class as a particular interest was in ninth grade in AP Modern European History. I appreciated tracking the roots of contemporary society, understanding the ways recent events, values, and practices had links into the past. Although I would not have used these words at the time, I was also fascinated by the workings of power and hierarchy and how resistance and change happens.
My decision to focus on history as an adult came from a course during my first year of college. I took a U.S. History Since 1945 course and became inspired by the intricate analysis of recent history and the consequences for contemporary conditions. I remained interested in the mechanisms of power and hierarchy as well as the inescapable if often unexamined past. I became very focused on political and social movements in the twentieth century–not labor or economics. I especially liked seeing behind the iconic images and mythic stories of Martin Luther King, Jr., the hippies, and women’s liberation, and exploring the complicated contexts, layered efforts, and contradictory people and actions that cultivated big political and social changes. The diverse and wide-ranging actions connected to women’s liberation became a special focus. My senior thesis used a collection of radical feminist magazines from the 1960s and early 1970s to understand their particular critique of the idea of women as vessels and explicit demands to end abortion and birth control restrictions.
Tell us about your undergraduate experience. Was history your main area of study? Did you complete an MA and PhD and if so, where?
I attended Dartmouth College from 1988 to 1992, when the college was finishing its first decade of coeducation. White men and fraternities still dominated the campus and big events like Homecoming. I had interests in visual art, creative writing, history, and literature. As a student from a working-class background–the first in my family to go away to college and attend a selective institution–any career path into visual art or creative writing seemed fraught with the unknown and uncertainty. I really enjoyed my history classes and found a mentor in Annelise Orleck, who taught courses in women’s history, recent U.S. history, and labor history. I also chose a history major because it could lead to law school, teaching, or corporate recruiting, and I really had no grand plan. Graduate school or a PhD intrigued me, but as with visual art or creative writing, I had no solid ideas about how to pursue a career with a PhD in history.
Starting in 1993, for several years, I taught public high school in central Massachusetts. The state required teachers to start a master’s degree within five years, and most chose to do it part-time or during summers at a local college or university. But I wanted to attend graduate school full time and immerse myself in studies in ways I had not during my undergraduate years, with all the socializing and campus activities. I applied to several master’s programs in history and selected the University of Vermont because it offered me a prestigious fellowship that provided direct funding–and I loved Vermont. I also liked that UVM’s History Department had a terminal master’s program without any PhD students, so MA students received more faculty contact and opportunities.
After I finished my MA, I returned to 9-12 public education but found I wanted more adventure and aspired to a writing career. Over the next ten years, I did freelance writing while developing my fiction, and then worked in adult basic education and community colleges to serve low-income, immigrant, and first-generation students. These students inspired me to think about earning my PhD. I again applied to several programs with advisors I really wanted to work with. I decided on the University of Connecticut because Micki McElya did the type of history that intrigued me: women’s history combined with cultural history and an interest in gender and race. The History Department also offered me a prestigious fellowship that provided direct funding and a reduced GA/TA load. My mentors from UVM had advised me to guarantee at least five years of funding and no loan dependency before accepting any offer. These practicalities are often not emphasized enough to applicants.
Aimee and her adviser Micki McElya at UConn’s 2019 PhD commencement
What were your research interests in graduate school?
I entered the UConn PhD program with a commitment to modern U.S. history and women’s history. I thought I might continue a previous project about women, gender, race, and the New Deal from my master’s program—but then I read Alice Kessler-Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity (2001) and she had already done the work I had imagined. I realized that I had to consider that I had been out of academic history for ten years and needed to reconnect with a new specialty. As far as finding that deeper specialization, I knew I wanted my research to relate to the increasing income and wealth inequality, but I was not interested in traditional business or economic history. I also decided to move ahead in time, to the 1960s to 1980s. My years out of academia had reinforced my interest in how mainstream popular culture restricts or limits people’s general understanding of complicated historical events. Even my friends from Dartmouth had very constrained or simplistic views of major moments in U.S. history, and my students had almost no historical understanding beyond what they had seen in movies and memorials.
An early UConn seminar paper on women’s labor and the depiction of a white woman in the movie Norma Rae (1979), which appeared repeatedly in my searches for U.S. working women in the 1970s, gave me the entry point for my dissertation. Planning for my oral exams led me to an intertwined interest in labor history and the history of capitalism, two fields many women’s labor historians had imagined as incompatible.
When I shifted from seminars and oral exams to my own research and prospectus, I expanded my research beyond the South to the U.S. Atlantic as a whole. The more I researched the women textile and garment workers behind the sensational image of the movie Norma Rae, the more I also wanted to study the increasing U.S. ties to global trade and financialization. It became clear that what people thought of as “globalization” and its start in the 1990s had begun much earlier.
A panel I coordinated for the 2019 Labor and Working-Class History Association conference (LAWCHA) on postwar women’s labor activism.
What do you think is the toughest part of tackling a research project?
The biggest challenges in tackling a research project depend on a person’s institutional status and the timing in life. I think for many scholars today, their status as contingent faculty (adjuncts, lecturers, contract hires, VAPs) has become the biggest obstacle to research. Even with temporary access to their institutional libraries and databases, they have heavy teaching loads and little to no access to travel or research funding. They often do not attend department meetings or have offices where they might discuss research with their colleagues.
As far as research in general, for all historians, I think the shift from exploratory research to targeted project goals is often a challenge. Historians enter any project open to where the archives and interviews will take them, but at some point they have to begin to manage their time, hone their reading, and find the ties through their archives. I tend toward research questions about large systems and their interactions rather than questions that drill into a narrow deep dive, so I find I really have to draw some boundaries—in framing as well as geography.
You have a diverse career as an educator. Tell us about some of the places you have taught and what type of students you have worked with during your teaching career.
I earned my 9-12 social studies teaching licensure and taught in a regional public high school in central Massachusetts. The academic classes were tracked into four levels: C2 (general), C1 (college prep), Honors, and AP. Classes for seniors, Honors, and AP were reserved for teachers with years on the job, so I taught grades 9-11 in C2 and C1 classes. The high school also had an alternative school housed within it. The alternative school was very small and required students who had run into behavioral and disciplinary issues to apply and show a real interest in wanting to do all the requirements to graduate with a diploma. Several of these students attended my C2 U.S. History classes because it was required. In 1994-1995, however, the state decided to implement the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) without including social studies. The test pushed curriculum reforms downward, eliminating social studies electives and forcing U.S. history teachers to integrate test prep. It was demoralizing.
I took a sabbatical for two years to complete my master’s degree and returned to the high school. But I found myself wanting to pursue adventure before settling into a career. I moved to Olympia, Washington, where I started freelance writing, from grants to local human interest articles. The borders of my political activism had shifted from broad feminist pursuits to a focused interest in class and race, especially the ways education, income, work, and wealth interacted for women. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality had not reached mainstream discourse, but that’s where my activism was taking me. I started to look for a job with an educational organization serving low-income students of color and found an amazing opportunity serving as the English GED Teacher at a program for pregnant and parenting adolescent girls and young women in a city with a large Puerto Rican population.
The staff and students were predominantly Puerto Rican (but the executive director and financial manager were white women). It was a tremendous experience where I learned as much as I shared and met two close friends who later contributed to my dissertation. But even the most disciplined students who completed their GED were dropping out of the local community colleges, often before the end of the first semester. I decided to develop the Next Steps program to prepare interested students for community college before they completed the GED test. I contacted the Social Sciences Dean at Holyoke Community College (HCC), a Latino man who connected me with a Mexican American woman who taught Criminal Justice 101. She allowed the students to attend her class as an unofficial audit. The Next Steps program entailed full immersion with my supportive attendance for the first half of the semester. I also offered wrap-around support for academic assignments, studying techniques, campus navigation, and college communication. I designed peer-to-peer support as well, with journal sharing and small circles for the young women to talk to each other and offer their own ideas for solutions. All the students who participated in Next Steps completed at least a year of community college and 80% finished two years.
I then moved to the Twin Cities and worked in North High School in Minneapolis for a new program that combined the goals of an alternative school and a Next Steps type of program. We had a designated area and staff to work with students who had behavioral and disciplinary issues that did not involve violence. They applied to be in the program to attend after-school activities and make plans for after graduation like trainings or colleges.
I returned to New England to teach in an innovative transition-to-college program in a partnership between HCC and a local nonprofit agency that provided adult basic education (ABE). The transition-to-college students came from regional ESL/ELL programs, carceral institutions, immigrant services, and factory layoffs, but they all wanted to go to college. I designed a three-tiered curriculum to help students get ready for the academic and personal challenges as well as campus navigation and college jargon. I built on previous experiences to create a completely intertwined transition-to-college program with technology, confidence building, academic skills, writing, test taking, professional communication, and household preparation. It was the most complete curriculum design and daily oversight that I have had in my career. The job was exciting and fun, but it had no opportunity for advancement. The nonprofit agency was also in a constant hunt for funding and did not offer a retirement plan. And the students inspired me to pursue my unspoken ambition to complete a PhD and teach at the college level. Due to the financial conditions in higher education and the pandemic, I don’t know if I will have the opportunity to teach college courses again. But like those students, I’m giving it my best shot.
You were an adjunct instructor for several years. What’s something people (both academics and non-academics) should know about adjunct instructors and what’s a good way folks can support adjuncts and their work?
I became an adjunct professor without seeking the position, but it was pivotal to my decision to apply to PhD programs. I was teaching as the ABE transition-to-college instructor at HCC when the Social Sciences Dean—the Mexican American criminal justice professor who I had worked with for Next Steps—sent me an email asking if I had a master’s degree in history and an interest in teaching History of the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. The adjunct they had contracted withdrew in August after getting a full-time job, and this course was a priority for her agenda. Two months later, the adjunct teaching World Civilizations to 1500 was called to reserve military duty, and she offered me the remainder of his contract. That launched seven years of adjunct teaching and rekindled my interest in scholarly history.
Students, parents, alumni, and community members as well as faculty and staff need to know that adjuncts are now the majority of college and university faculty. Contingent faculty and staff dominate campuses, but tenured faculty have the leverage that remains in shared governance. Most contingent faculty are dedicated and hard working, but this labor arrangement does not support a stable and innovative higher education system, and it is untenable for meeting students’ needs. When students, parents, and alumni learn these facts, hopefully they can pressure the U.S. government to restructure the funding of higher education. I recently joined Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education, an independent group that is pushing for such restructuring. It has partnered with the progressive Roosevelt Institute—which recently issued a white paper—and the AFT/AAUP unions to start an intensive lobbying effort.
Federal support for higher education needs to go beyond the FAFSA and its guidelines for student loans and Pell grants. The funding of higher education has increasingly fallen to students and families, with the cuts in higher education hitting academic departments, especially the humanities. Meanwhile, construction, administration, and debt financing consume more of campus budgets.
Image from the archives of the now-closed American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA; it’s from a manual on textile machinery.
What do you believe is the most rewarding part of being a teacher/educator?
I have taught in enough settings to know rewards differ across sites. The most inspiring teaching moments came with low-income and first-generation students realizing they could succeed in school; they could do academic analysis, write papers, and contribute to discussions. They could get critical feedback or stumble on some assignments, and go on. I also really enjoyed sharing our personal stories of overcoming challenges in school or college as a way to model persistence and analyze how gender, race, and class intersect to impact our various experiences. I know students often become enamored of teachers who tell compelling stories about famous people or big events, and I work those into my instruction—but the most rewarding exchanges happened when we all talked about coming up to a hurdle, maybe tripping on it, but heading toward the end anyway.
At a large university or selective liberal arts college, on the other hand, I realized many students in my classes would go on to leadership positions in their field and carry their learning into legislation, policies, and media production. It was a total change of perspective to hear young women who absolutely believed they would become executive directors, diplomats, senators, top engineers, or think tank policymakers. When they discussed the course material and engaged with the analysis, many of them imagined how these new ideas and interpretations might shape their approaches when they advanced in their careers. That feeling of reward was both individual in sharing the student’s intellectual journey and broad in understanding the importance of enhancing critical thinking and communication skills in preparing graduates who would have easier or quicker access to mechanisms of power.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
The biggest misconception across all times and places about what historians do: historians memorize events, names, and dates. The second biggest misconception: history is only traditional political history with a little military history in the mix, so all historians know everything about presidents and wars.
In my experience, most people do not think about how historians work. People outside the academic humanities do not know much if anything about archives and oral histories. Some folks who love local history do get to know their historical society or museum and understand the basics, but this group has been shrinking. With friends, family, and students of all ages, I have to explain the idea of primary sources, secondary texts, and original history research. Historians as a profession need to reach out to general audiences and publicize their work process and the vibrancy of history as an exploration if they want to sustain history departments, enrollment, and archives.
Tell us about your book project, Creating Norma Rae: Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Southern Labor Organizers Lost in Reagan’s America.
This book is a revised version of my dissertation, which received the 2020 Lerner-Scott Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for the best dissertation in U.S. women’s history. The book does not simply recover Crystal Lee Sutton, the inspiration for the movie Norma Rae (1979), but reevaluates the context in which she worked and organized, expanding it beyond the South to the U.S. Atlantic, including Puerto Rico. By employing a transnational framework and a cross-disciplinary lens, Creating Norma Rae questions the centrality of white southern mill workers in labor histories, emphasizes the significance of migrating women of color in a long history of global supply chains, and interrogates how culture shapes neoliberal political economy.
I bring together tools from women’s labor history, history of capitalism, and cultural history to explore the larger circumstances that led to the contested production of Norma Rae and the cultural work the film did to reconstitute a narrow notion of the white American working class. I argue that U.S. government offices and textile and garment enterprises incorporated women of the New South and Puerto Rico into manufacturing in distinct yet interrelated ways. The result highlights the intersectional dynamics of power and structural inequalities as well as the experiences and agency of women workers. Despite such complicated conditions, a fascination with poor white southerners led popular media to focus on Crystal Lee, a mill hand in North Carolina and member of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in the early 1970s.
My detailed study of Norma Rae shows how popular culture works to rearticulate familiar meanings and obscure disconcerting complexities due to its own reliance on gendered and racialized narratives. I emphasize the importance of capitalist mechanisms in the arena of cultural politics, especially regarding questions of who contests and shapes the visibility and meanings for “working class,” “worker,” and “American.” The book analyzes how Hollywood professionals used legal contrivances to remove Crystal Lee from the production and change its title. The resulting movie elided a long history of southern and civil rights labor activism and contributed to the erasure of Puerto Rican needleworkers. The business maneuvers, however, do not tell the simple story of a naïve mill hand exploited by a big movie studio. Crystal Lee used the success of Norma Rae in the early 1980s to reassert her own point of view.
This book provides a counter-narrative to the erasures of Norma Rae by turning the lens to study Puerto Rican women also working and organizing in the U.S. textile and garment industry. Although it would have been simpler to remain within the conventional bounds of southern labor history, such geographic constructs camouflage the diversity of women workers, the long history of U.S. colonial industrialization, and its impact on the metropole as well as global sites. During the same years as the TWUA membership drive and the making of Norma Rae, Gloria Maldonado and thousands of Puerto Rican women in New York City joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) as their grandmothers had done on the main island in the 1930s. Puerto Rican union representatives like Maldonado often articulated a shrewd awareness of employment within the larger struggle over the terms of globalization along with their demands regarding immediate work conditions. They also participated in a 1984 public history project “Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura” that celebrated their hard work, migrations, resistance, and labor activism.
From the digital cover of an archival collection held by El Centro at Hunter College-CUNY
You’re a historian of transnational labor and capital. First, can you tell our readers what that means. And second, what are some books or articles that you recommend to better understand the field? Also who are some scholars whose work on transnational labor and capital have inspired you and your research?
I have to admit, I developed the phrase “transnational labor and capital” to describe my work because I did not want to remain bordered by the fifty U.S. states or limited by more conventional notions of labor history as I study the movements of workers, products, and capital. As a modern U.S. historian, I am interested in workers and investment moving throughout and into the United States and the ways women workers negotiate and resist the movement of products, jobs, and capital. At the same time, I want to include the histories of corporate and financial configurations without allowing them to appear inevitable or totally hegemonic. Women workers navigated, questioned, and resisted these larger configurations and shaped them, despite the power and resource differentials.
Several works inspired this approach. The very first book that led me to this mode of thinking was Sidney Mintz’s foundational work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). To illuminate the “labor and capital” aspect more clearly, I would say my work aligns with both Annelise Orleck’s We Are All Fast Food Workers Now (2018), which examines workers and activism across the world, and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), which emphasizes the relationship between the state and capital rather than the workers. These recent books capture the two aspects of transnational economies that I want to understand in relation to each other.
Other inspirational books—by historians who might or might not imagine their interest as “transnational labor and capital”—include Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History by Catherine Ceniza Choy (2003), Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer Morgan (2004), Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of the Global Working Class by Aviva Chomsky (2008), Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation by Moon-Ho Jung (2008), The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal by Julie Greene (2009), No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor by Cindy Hahamovitch (2011), River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson (2013), and Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States by Heidi Tinsman (2014).
Photo of Aimee from an article about her short story appearing in a collection of 2010’s best unpublished short fiction.
Besides your historical scholarship, you also write fiction. Tell us about your fiction writing and where can we find it? If we want to read some, what story should we start with first?
My love of reading and libraries led me to writing. As a child, I wrote diary entries, poems, cartoons, and articles for my own interest. My traditional K-12 education in the 1970s and 1980s still emphasized canonical literature but I also found books by women and feminist authors. Alice Walker and Toni Morrison exploded into the U.S. literary scene in the 1980s and 1990s. And I really wanted to be part of this realm of writers, fiction, ideas. I started working on a novel in the late 1990s, but honing my craft involved working on short fiction. I took creative writing workshops at literary organizations like The Loft in Minneapolis and Grub Street in Boston. I read and read. And after two years of writing short fiction, I published my first story “Ultimate Cassandra”—the myth of Cassandra continues to fascinate me. I think “Nina” is the first short story that I felt actually crossed into solid literature and where readers can see my maturing creative voice and point of view. This website lists my fiction with links to the pieces available online. I am proud of “The Things You Take, The Things You Leave” and “Souvenirs.” If readers want to hear me, The Drum has a recording of me reading “Three Women Wishing for a Boy.”
The PhD program took all my writing and reading energies, so my fiction writing paused in 2012, and I just returned to it in 2020. After submitting my dissertation in April 2019, I focused on two journal articles and took time to get settled in my new job and reorganize my home office and daily life. The postdoctoral fellowship involves large amounts of reading and writing, and in April 2020 I began revising my dissertation into the first draft of a book manuscript. Once I began sending out that manuscript, I again had the energy, time, and emotional space to consider new writing projects.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
My dream project would trace the history of the increasing production of fast fashion—including clothing, accessories, shoes, perfumes, and beauty products—from the investors to the manufacturing of their component parts to the modeling of the items to the shipping and retail sales. All these mechanisms and fast-fashion items reinforce each other to drive consumer desires with brand identities, low prices, and the exploitation of mostly poor women of color as low-wage labor. Then I would find multiple examples of the ways poor working women on multiple continents and in different job settings navigate, resist, and organize against the exploitation of the supply chains. Of course, I would need a vast amount of travel money and knowledge of almost ten languages to cover such a span—it’s a dream.
If I ever have the job stability and tenure status to design my ultimate class, it would bring together college students with potential first-generation and under-represented students from area high schools, ABE, ESL/ELL, and HiSET/GED programs so that the college students already on campus become naturalized models and resources for incoming students. The class would cover global capitalism, women, gender and race since 1900 (my favorite topic) with both high academic standards and ingrained professor and peer-to-peer support so both cohorts have the opportunity to achieve their objectives.
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
Having moved in and out of academia, I gained insights from years of experience as a public high school teacher, freelance writer, GED teacher, and instructor for a transition-to-college program. If I had not decided to return to academia for a PhD, I would have continued writing fiction and sought a position as a director of an ABE transition-to-college program, but these are rare. While there are many resources to help students with financial aid or special needs, and a variety of identity and cultural programs that students can find, many first-gen and under-represented students need more intentional support.
I envision a broader and intertwined bridge into college that addresses all the topics: academic preparation, tutoring, writing, contacting professors, the purpose of different campus offices, financial aid, special needs, campus activities, identity and cultural programs, majors vs. general education and graduation requirements, leadership and internship options, and reading transcripts. A well-designed transition-to-college program could offer students a meaningful and larger understanding of college, a thorough preparation, and one-on-one personalized guidance.
One of my career missions remains access, retention, and completion for first-generation and under-represented students.
History Ph.D. student Aimee Loiselle at Beach Hall on November 14, 2017. (Bri Diaz/UConn Photo)
- For more on what a postdoc is and does, please see “How Anny Gaul Does History.”