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About Me

Elizabeth Faue is Director of Labor@Wayne and Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Wayne State University.  She specializes in labor and working-class history and women’s and gender history.  Her current research projects are on the activism of teachers and nurses and the idea of the public good and occupational health and safety; her interests include interdisciplinary and comparative work in labor and workplace studies.

Recently, Elizabeth Faue received the Distinguished Service to Labor and Working Class History Award (2022) from the Labor and Working Class History.  In fall 2023, she will be a visiting senior scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna for her project, “Re-Discovering that Work Is Dangerous:  Redefining Workplace Risk in the Late Twentieth Century.”

Faue’s publications include Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (1991), Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism (2002), and Rethinking the American Labor Movement (2017), and more than 200 articles, book chapters, and book reviews.

The daughter of union parents and a third-generation unionist, Elizabeth Faue received her B.A. (1979) in English summa cum laude and her M.A. in history (1985) at the University of Minnesota before finishing her doctorate there in 1987. Susan B. Anthony Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Rochester from 1988-1990 and came to Wayne State University in Fall 1990. She became a full professor in 2002.  She served as Interim Associate Dean of the Graduate School (2007-2009) and Director of Graduate Studies in History (2010-2015) and became History Department Chair in July 2015 and Director of Labor@Wayne in Fall 2022.

Faue has been the recipient of many awards, including Board of Governors’ Faculty Recognition Award (1992, 2018), Career Development Chair (1995-96), Outstanding Graduate Mentor (2000), Charles H. Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2004-05), and the Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award (2018). Faue was Visiting Senior Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1994-95) and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University (1995-96).  She has excelled as an academic leader, especially in graduate education. She served in the Graduate School on the Graduate Council and as Interim Associate Dean.  As lead co-PI she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Next Generation Humanities PhD planning grant, which created the WSU Humanities Clinic (established 2017). An advocate for graduate education, Faue has been a co-PI on Career Diversity grants from the American Historical Association and the Council of Graduate Schools grant on career pathways.  She has a signal interest in interdisciplinary curriculum and in integrating internships into undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Recent Publications

Rethinking the American Labor Movement.  New York/London:  Routledge, 2017.

“Work and the Politics of the Injured Body: Health, Gender, and Workplace Democracy in the United States,” in E. Betti, S. Neunsinger, L. Papastefanaki, M. Tolomelli, S. Zimmermann, eds, Women, Work, and Agency: Organizing and Activism around the World in the Long 20^th Century, Work and Labor Transdisciplinary Studies for the 21^st Century series (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022), 187-208.

“Responding to the Shadow of Tragedy: Jeanne Stellman and the Work of the Women’s Occupational Health Resource Center,” co-authored with Amanda Lauren Walter, Journal of Women’s History 34:1 (Spring 2022), 94-115.

“The Precarious Work of Care: OSHA, AIDS, and Women Health Care Workers, 1983-2000.” Co-authored with Josiah Rector. Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 17:4 (December 2020), 9-33.

“Fix the Workplace, Not the Worker: Labour Feminism and the Shifting Grounds of Equality in the U.S. Workplace, 1960-91,” co-authored with Josiah Rector and Amanda Lauren Walter, Labour History 119 (November 2020), 93-114.

“Battle for or in the Classroom: Teacher Strikes in the Context of School Violence and Integration,” in Strike for the Common Good: Fighting for the Future of Public Education, eds. Rebecca Kolins Givan and Amy Schrager Lang (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 36-49.

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, Modern, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Environment, Family, Gender, Government, Labor, Politics, Women, World War I, World War II