Dr. Leilah Danielson (she/her)

In Fall 2023, I’m teaching a new class that examines themes of work, class, and labor movements in the United States from 1900 to the present. How has work been structured and how has it changed over the past 125 years? How has class intersected with race, ethnicity, gender, and culture? How have workers resisted their exploitation? Why and how has the labor movement changed over time, and what impact has it had on U.S. society and culture? What has been the relationship between the labor movement and other social movements, such as civil rights and feminism? Are workers better off now than they were 100 years ago?

The U.S. history survey! Students come to the class thinking that they know U.S. history only to discover that it is far more complex, multifaceted, and interesting than they ever imagined.

I’ve published two books and a number of articles on the history of religion, race, and American social movements. My book monograph, American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) traces the evolving political and religious views of one of the most beloved figures of the American left, while also charting the rise and fall of American progressivism over the course of the twentieth century.

I’m also co-editor of an anthology (with Doug Rossinow and Marian Mollin) entitled The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), a collection of essays that covers the diversity of the religious left, including Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish history, and important essays on African-American, Latino, and women’s spirituality. My more recent publications include a chapter related to my new research on workers’ education entitled “Marxism and Americanism: A.J. Muste, Louis Budenz, and an ‘American Approach’ Before the Popular Front” in Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, eds., Marxism and America: New Appraisals (University of Manchester Press, 2021): 71-94. I also wrote a piece “Civil Religion as Myth, Not History” that was published in Religions 10, no. 6 (June 2019): 1-16.

My current research focuses on the history of the workers’ education movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The project will explore the movement’s origins, its theory and practice, and how it evolved over time in relationship to the conservative labor movement, the crisis of the Great Depression, and the rise of the New Deal state. Questions of education and social class, teacher identity and pedagogy, and knowledge construction and power will be at the center of the analysis.

I love hiking with friends, reading mysteries, hanging out with my kids, and walking on the beach.