Anne Lessy

Anne Lessy is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on the politics of gender, race, labor, and social welfare 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 economic citizenship in the mid-Atlantic during the 1930s and 1940s. Her work has been supported by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; the Labor and Working-Class History Association; and the Maryland Center for History and Culture.

 

Anne is actively engaged in public history and the digital humanities. She developed education and professional development programs for the Museum of Jewish Heritage and performed curatorial research for the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, the American Social History Project, the Lesbian Herstory Archive, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She received her B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Prior to graduate school, Anne was a community organizer and campaign researcher in New York City.