Dr. Laurie Green

Biography

As a historian, Laurie B. Green focuses on the dynamics of power and ideas surrounding social justice movements in the mid-20th century United States, particularly involving poor working-class women, Blacks, and Latinas/os as intersecting identities in rural and urban contexts. Her research pays close attention to contested understandings of gender, race, labor, migration, poverty, malnutrition, health, medicine, print and broadcast media, and political popular culture. Green’s current project, 'The Discovery of Hunger in America: A Site of Public Crisis in Race, Health, and American Democracy,' investigates the public outcry over severe hunger and malnutrition affecting millions of poor individuals, including Blacks, Native Americans, Latinas/os, and Appalachian whites, starting in the mid-1960s and continuing into the following decade. Her book, 'Battling Plantation Mentality: Memphis Black Freedom Struggle' (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), won the 2008 Philip Taft Award for Labor History and explores the meanings of freedom as urban migrants protested racist labor practices. In her courses, Green incorporates methodologies from historical narrative, relational comparative history, and various scholarly fields, fostering public-facing digital history projects and engaging students in oral history initiatives and examinations of contemporary social movements.

Research Interests

Courses