Joanne Meyerowitz

Department: 
History and American Studies
Biography: 

Joanne Meyerowitz, Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and of American Studies, joined the Yale faculty in 2004. She received her BA from the University of Chicago and her MA and PhD from Stanford University. She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 and History and September 11th. Her most recent book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit, is a history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. It shows how and why anti-poverty efforts increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.

Before joining the faculty at Yale, she taught at the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University, and for five years edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history.  She has won fellowships from institutions includding the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Social Science Research Council. Her books have won prizes from the American Library Association, Foreword Magazine, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and her public writing has appeared in, among other periodicals, Politico, Public Seminar, and the Washington Post. At the University of Cincinnati she won the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and at Yale she won the Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities. She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and past president of the Organization of American Historians.

 At Yale she has served as chair of LGBT Studies, chair of American Studies, and acting chair of the Department of History. She is currently co-director of the Yale Research Inititaive on the History of Sexualities and teaches courses on recent U.S. history, gender, sexuality, and poverty.