PERSON: Jacob Remes


Employer

SUNY Empire State College
Position

Assistant profesor
Biography

I am a mentor and assistant professor of public affairs and history at SUNY Empire State College, where I am based in the Brooklyn Unit of the Metropolitan Center. I study and teach the working-class and labor history of North America, with a focus on urban disasters, working-class organizations, and migration. My prize-winning dissertation, “Cities of Comrades: Urban Disasters and the Formation of the North American Progressive State,” examined the overlapping responses of individuals, families, civil society, and the state to the Salem, Mass., Fire of 1914, and the Halifax, N.S., Explosion of 1917. My book, Disaster Citizenship, based on that dissertation, will be published in 2015 by the University of Illinois Press. I’ve also written scholarly articles on a variety of other subjects, ranging from interwar Social Catholicism to Indigenous land rights to transnational printers in the 19th century. I served twice as executive secretary of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and I am a founding member of the Southern Labor Studies Association and the Labor Research and Action Network. I have received awards from the Canadian Committee on Labour History, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, Duke University, and Yale University, and I have been the William Lyon Mackenize King Research Fellow at Harvard, a Josephine de Karman Fellow, a University Scholar at Duke, a Kenan Center for Ethics Graduate Colloquium Fellow, and an American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellow. I got a B.A. in history from Yale University in 2002 and an M.A. (2006) and Ph.D (2010) in history from Duke.

My teaching and mentoring interests are related to my research. I lead study groups in disaster studies, human rights, history of the welfare state, ethics, labor studies, and American government. I also teach modern American history, immigration history and policy, labor history, Canadian history, and U.S.-Canada relations, and a variety of other topics. In addition to Empire State, I have taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, Duke University, and Meiji University in Tokyo.

My historical work informs and inspires contemporary interests in the labor movement, urban affairs, and disaster response. I tweet regularly on these topics (and others) as @jacremes. My popular writing has appeared in The Nation, Salon, the News and Observer, Alternet, Truth-Out, and on various blogs. The Spring 2010 issue of the Kenan Institute for Ethics newsletter Ethics in Action contains an interview with me about the ethics of disaster relief [pdf]. Sometimes, reporters ask me for historical or other background on topics about which I have some expertise.

— Jacob Remes
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