Daniel Clark

Title:  Professor and Director, Center for Public Humanities
Office: 407 Varner Hall
Phone: (248) 370-3532
Fax: (248) 370-3528
Email: [email protected]

Education:
Ph.D., Duke University

Major Fields:
American Labor History, Twentieth-Century U.S. Social History

Biography:
My main area of expertise is U.S. Labor History. My first book, Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), explored what unionization meant to workers and managers at cotton mills in a North Carolina community during the 1940s and 1950s. My most recent book, Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom (University of Illinois Press, 2018), argues that for ordinary autoworkers the period from 1945-60 was marked by job instability and economic insecurity, not a steady rise into the middle class.

I regularly teach courses on U.S. Labor and Cold War America as well as undergraduate and graduate seminars. I also teach courses about Detroit labor history and oral history methodology.

To complement teaching and research, I like to run, especially in the woods, and I coordinate a community organic garden.

Publications:

Listening to Workers from the Bottom Up: Oral Histories of Metro-Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming)

Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).  Named as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2019.

Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)