Jennifer Klein

Jennifer Klein is the Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. Her work focuses on U.S. labor politics, social policy, and political economy in 20^th century United States. Her prize-winning books include For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton University Press) and Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press), co-authored with Eileen Boris. In Klein’s current project on sugar plantations, petrochemicals, prisons, and the geography of waste in Louisiana, she has extended her view of the work site to prisons, riverbanks, and swamps, incorporating the labors of free and unfree work forces, from the 18^th to the late 20^th century. In addition to academic journals and collections, her articles have appeared in Dissent, the New York Times, American Prospect.org, Washington Post.com, The Nation.com, and New Labor Forum. She’s been a recipient of fellowships from the NEH, Russell Sage Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Brookings Institution, and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Research Center.