Dr. Jessie Wilkerson Wins Award from the Labor and Working Class History Association

Jessica Wilkerson Wins Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation

Dr. Jessica Wilkerson, who just completed her first year as Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies, has just won an award from the Labor and Working Class History Association for her dissertation, “Where Movements Meet: From the War on Poverty to Grassroots Feminism in the Appalachian South.” The award committee included Alice Kessler-Harris of Columbia, Jacob Remes of SUNY Empire State College, and Jarod Roll of the University of Mississippi.

You may remember that Dr. Wilkerson also recently won the Lerner-Scott Prize from the Organization of American Historians, which is awarded for the best dissertation in US women’s history. Read more about it here.

Here’s the release from LAWCHA about Wilkerson’s more recent honor:

The Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) is pleased to announce its annual Herbert Gutman Dissertation Prize, established with the cooperation with the University of Illinois Press. LAWCHA, founded in 1998, encourages the study of working-class men and women, their lives, workplaces, communities, organizations, cultures, activism, and societal contexts. It aims to promote an international, theoretically informed, comparative, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and diverse labor and working-class history.

The dissertation prize is named in honor of the late Herbert G. Gutman, a pioneering labor historian in the U.S. and a founder of the University of Illinois Press’s “Working Class in American History” Series. LAWCHA hopes that the spirit of Gutman’s inquiry into the many facets of labor and working-class history will live on through this prize. The winner will receive a cash prize of $500 from LAWCHA and a publishing contract with the University of Illinois Press. The prize award is contingent upon the author’s acceptance of the contract with the University of Illinois Press.