A passing of the torch takes place tomorrow here at Legal History Blog. Since July 2013, Emily A. Prifogle has performed the duties of the office now known as Associate Blogger. (Clara Altman, now Director of the Federal Judicial History Office of the Federal Judicial Center, originated the role.) Emily has a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is ABD in History at Princeton. This semester I’ve had the pleasure of reading a chapter on school consolidation from her dissertation-in-progress, “Views from the Midwest: Rural Communities, Law, and Nation in the Twentieth Century.” To clear the decks for her return to Indiana and the start of a judicial clerkship in the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, she has decided to join the ranks of LHB bloggers emeritae. All of us at LHB could not be more grateful to Em for all her work over the years and wish her our best.
We’re fortunate that two other ABDs are willing to take up her duties and serve as co-Associate Bloggers. Brooke Depenbusch is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation is “Working on Welfare: Down and Out in the United States, 1935-1962.” It explores the nexus between social provision and low-wage and insecure labor from the New Deal to the War on Poverty. Focusing on the interaction of low-income working families and public relief, it foregrounds the political and economic conditions that fostered persistent insecurity and precarity among many working families notwithstanding the sustained economic growth of the postwar period.
LHB readers may recall Smita Ghosh’s panel recaps for the ASLH's annual meeting and recent conferences at Columbia on incarceration and at Princeton on life and law in rural America. She is a student in Penn's JD/PhD program in American Legal History and has already completed the law-school leg of her education and is now studying the history of immigration and civil rights law. In 2016-2017, she will be a judicial clerk in the District of Connecticut.
Thank you, Em, and welcome, Brooke and Smita!
