Labor and Political Economy at the Warren Center

 [Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The 2025-26 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship will be on the theme of Labor and Political Economy in American History led by Joel Suarez (Harvard History and Social Studies) and Sven Beckert (Harvard History).

The Warren Center, Harvard’s research center for United States history, invites applications for a seminar on Labor and Political Economy in American History. The goal is to advance the revival and reimagining of labor history. Recent histories and theorizations of class formation and social reproduction have emerged alongside new research in law and political economy, money and finance, and environmental and intellectual history, providing rich portraits of economic life that are too often written in parallel rather than in conversation with one another. We will build on these developments to foster a capacious labor history that explains change in working class life while embracing the temporal, geographical, and methodological expansiveness found in the various subfields and disciplines concurrently historicizing capitalism’s long history. We seek fellows and guest lecturers from diverse scholarly backgrounds including, but not limited to law, political theory, sociology, anthropology, labor studies, political economy, and social, political, environmental, intellectual, and economic and financial history. We are in particular interested in scholars thinking about American labor history in transnational, global, and comparative perspectives.

This endeavor aims to build on traditional studies of proletarianization and class re-compositions by expanding labor history’s temporal scope, range of methodologies, and subjects of inquiry. That is, we seek to continue labor history’s inquiry into the labor movement and its historicizing of foundational concepts (e.g., the family, freedom, property, the market, race, the state), but also seek to invite scholars who bring new questions and methodologies to the study of informal labor and informal markets, waged and unwaged reproductive labor, unemployment and wageless life, debt and public and private power, migration and the state, environmental agency and crises, social rights and liberalism, money and ideology, and other areas of research that center labor in the history of capitalism.

Fellows will present their work in a seminar led by Joel Suarez (Harvard History and Social Studies) and Sven Beckert (Harvard History). Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and an office which they must use for at least the 9-month academic year. The Center encourages applications consistent with the seminar theme and from qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the diversity and excellence of the community. Stipends: individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources, up to a maximum of $66,000. Note that recent average stipends have been in the range of $50,000.

Application deadline: January 8, 2025.  Letters of recommendation deadline: January 10, 2025. Apply [here.]