Leon Fink, PhD
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
History
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About
Leon Fink, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and a specialist in American labor, immigration history, postwar politics, and the Gilded Age/Progressive Era, retired from teaching in 2017 after seventeen years of service at UIC as founder and director of the PhD concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World (WRGUW).
For another five years, from his new base in Washington DC, he continued to edit Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, the official journal of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), through the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, an organization on which he continues to serve as senior associate researcher.
Fink is the author or principal editor of a dozen books and is recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including service as a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Senior Scholar, NEH Fellow, and recipient of the Sol Stetin Award of the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Professor Fink has also taken a leading role in national history education circles, where he has stressed the necessary collaboration between the university and the public schools.
Selected Book Publications
Liberal Jews in an Illiberal World: How Questions of Freedom, Justice, and Nationalism Roiled a Modernizing Community (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, forthcoming 2027)
The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (first ed. 2003; new and expanded edition 2024)
Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II (2022)
Labor Justice Across the Americas (2018)
The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Promise of a New World Order (2015)
Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Third Edition (2015)
Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (2014) - "Book of Year" prize from the International Labor History Association
The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of New World Order (2014)