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 second 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. My most recent book, Listening to Workers: Oral Histories of Metro-Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s (University of Illinois Press, 2024) is a collection of life history narratives constructed from my interviews with retired autoworkers. The goal was to provide a sense of autoworkers as full-fledged human beings, for whom jobs in the auto industry were one aspect of their complicated lives. Both of the books published by the University of Illinois Press are part of the Working Class in American History series.

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: Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024)

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)