Founding Directors

Thomas Dublin is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus. He is the author or editor of eight books including Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1979), winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Merle Curti Award. The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century, explores the gendered dimensions of deindustrialization in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania since 1920 and received the 2006 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians. Curriculum vitae.

Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History Emerita. She is the author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (1995), and other books and articles on women and social movements. Her first book, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973), analyzed how women reshaped gender identities and gender relationships in the antebellum era. Both of these books received the Berkshire Prize as the best book written by a woman historian in any field.  She is currently completing a study of the social origins of state minimum wage laws, 1887-1938. Curriculum vitae.