Anne Lessy

Anne Lessy is a PhD candidate whose research interests center on gender, race, labor, social welfare, and the carceral state in twentieth century America. Her dissertation, “‘Force These Idlers to Accept Employment’: Labor Coercion, Racialized Gender, and the Struggle for the New Deal Warfare State,” examines the persistence of coercive labor regimes and struggles for social and economic citizenship in the mid-Atlantic during the 1930s – 1950s. She received her B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and is currently a Lord Baltimore Fellow at the Maryland Historical Society. Prior to graduate school, she developed strategic campaigns for new organizing at SEIU 32BJ. Anne is the founder of the Carceral State Working Group at Yale.