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About Me

The Hull Professor and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, History, Black Studies, and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Eileen Boris writes on the home as a workplace and racialized gender and the state. Her books include the prize-winning monographs Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States [Cambridge University Press, 1994] and Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, co-authored with Jennifer Klein, (Oxford University Press, 2012, 2015). She is the co-editor, with Rhacel Parreñas, of Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care (Stanford University Press, 2010) and, with Dorothea Hoehtker and Susan Zimmermann, Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labor Standards, and Gender Equity (Brill and ILO, 2018). She currently is writing a transnational history, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 (Oxford, under contract). Her public writings have appeared in New York Times, The American Prospect, Time, the Nation, Al-Jazeera America, Huffington Post, New Labor Forum, Salon, Dissent, and Labor Notes. She is the President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. She has held the Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki and visiting professorships at Paris VII, the University of Melbourne, Tokyo Christian Women’s University, and University of Toulouse. She was PI for “Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity,” “Enforcement Strategies for Empowerment: Models for the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights,” and “The Labor of Care.” Her articles have appeared in JAH, Signs, Feminist Studies, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Policy History, Labor, ILWCH, and elsewhere. She has served on the executive boards of LAWCHA and the Social Science History Association and on prize and other committees for the OAH, American Studies Association, AHA, and Berkshire Conference.

Recent Publications

2019    Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards (Oxford, forthcoming)

2017    with Dorothea Hoehtker and Susan Zimmermann, ed. Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity (Brill and ILO)

2015      co-editor with P. Nadasen, “Historicizing Domestic Workers,” special issue, ILWCH, No.88, Fall

2012     Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State with J. Klein Oxford Univ. Press, winner of the Sara A, Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association; paperback 2015

2014      “Class Returns,” Journal of Women’s History, 25^th Anniversary Issue, Winter

2014     ‘‘Slaves No More’: Making Global Labor Standards for Domestic Workers,” with J. Fish, Feminist Studies, Summer, 411-43

with H. Berg, “Protecting Virtue, Erasing Labor: Historical Responses to Trafficking,” in Human Trafficking Reconsidered, ed. Parreñas and Hoag, Open Society

2016     “The Gender of Labor History: the Difference It Makes,” Genesis, 147-66

2017     “SEWA’s Feminism,” in Women’s Activism and “Second-Wave Feminism”: Transnational Histories, ed. Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson (New York: Bloomsbury,) 79-98.

2017     “Workplace Discrimination, Equal Pay, and Sexual Harassment: An Intersectional Approach,” withAllison Elias, The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism, H. McCammonet al. (New York: Oxford), 193-213

2017     “Decent Work in the Home: Affect and Rights Talk,” Santa Clara Journal of International Law,15 (1), 79-102

2017  “Subsistence and Household Labour” in Handbook on the Global History of Work, K. Hofmeester and M. van der Linden, eds. (De Gruyter Oldenbourg), 229-334

Media Coverage

Eileen Boris on JFK: https://vimeo.com/79529593 Women, Safety, and Culture, KCRW: https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/santa-barbara-killings-d-a-jackie-lacy-the-la-river#seg-women-safety-and-culture Speaking to UDWA:

Social Media

twitter.com/eileen_boris?lang=en

Country Focus

USA, transnational

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Capitalism, Gender, Human Rights, Law, Race, Women