Dear RSF:

Please join us next Wednesday, October 26 at 11 for Visiting Scholar Jennifer Klein’s presentation, “Wastelands: The Economic Geography of Waste, Coercion, and Marginalization in Southeastern Louisiana, 1790-1990s”.

Klein is Durfee Professor of History at Yale University, where she has been appointed since 2003. She first came to Yale as a Robert Wood Foundation fellow in Health Policy, and prior to that she was at Smith College. Klein holds a PhD in History from the University of Virginia and a BA in History from Barnard College. Her specialties are 20th century US history, urban history, labor history and 20th century political economy and policy. Klein was the winner of the 2014 Hans Sigrist Prize (Bern, Switzerland) for her contribution to the field of “Women and Precarity: Historical Perspectives.”  Her book, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford, 2012), co-authored with Eileen Boris, was awarded the Sara A. Whaley book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Publisher’s link.  Klein’s earlier monograph, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003) was awarded the Ellis W. Hawley Prize in Political History/Political Economy from the Organization of American Historians and The Hagley Prize in Business History from the Business History Conference. Publisher’s link

Klein’s current work explores the interconnections between the history of incarceration and the environment in Southeastern Louisiana. She is focusing on the institutions that took root on Louisiana’s former sugar plantations: prisons and confinement hospitals, chemical plants, and waste removal facilities. Revealing the profitable processes of waste, the project highlights the relationships between mass incarceration, coerced labor, and environmental racism.