Profile

Elizabeth Faue

Wayne State Univ.

Contact Details

Wayne State Univ.

Bio

Professor Elizabeth Faue is an internationally known scholar of gender and working-class history and a professor of history at Wayne State University. After she graduated from the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., History, 1987; B.A., English, Summa Cum Laude, 1979), Faue became Susan B. Anthony Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s Studies (1988-1990). In the fall of 1990, she was hired at Wayne State. In the past twenty-five years, Dr. Faue has become known for her work in exploring the gendered cultural dimensions of labor, politics, and working-class experience and as an advocate for interdisciplinary scholarship, critical engagement, and graduate education. She served as an interim associate dean of the Graduate School from 2007 to 2009, as a frequent member of the Graduate Council and, recently, as a member of the Humanities Center Advisory Board. Since 2010, she has been Director of Graduate Studies in History. In recognition of her graduate work, Faue won the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2000 and has been re-nominated for that award twice in recent years.

Elizabeth Faue has authored two books --Community of Suffering and Struggle, on gender in the labor movement of the 1930s, and Writing the Wrongs, a biography of labor journalist and organizer, Eva McDonald Valesh. She has written more than thirty articles and hundreds of encyclopedia entries, book reviews, and presentations. She also edited volume 7 of Encyclopedia of American History (The Making of Modern America, 1900-1929) and special issues of Labor History and Social Science History. Her current projects focus on issues from the role of veterans to the transformation of the workplace and of workplace politics since World War II, workplace risk and endangerment, and an interpretive history of the labor movement in the United States in the twentieth century.

A hallmark of her scholarship has been Faue’s determination to cross scholarly boundaries, raise new questions, and de-familiarize topics with which we have been comfortable. She began as a lyric poet, wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on Emily Dickinson, and started her graduate training with the purpose of studying interwar modern Greek poetry and politics. While she has not yet returned to that subject, she brings some of this lyric sensibility to her scholarship.

In her role as coordinator for the North American Labor History Conference between 1991 and 2003, Dr. Faue brought over 2000 scholars to the annual conference held at Wayne State. As a program chair and officer of the Social Science History Association, she expanded the labor network and made crucial links among scholars of different disciplines. She was one of the founding members of, and active in, both the Labor and Working Class History Association and the Working Class Studies Association. She has served on the editorial boards of International Labor and Working Class History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Workers of the World: International Journal of Strikes and Social Conflicts (Brazil), Labour History (Australia), Labour History Review (United Kingdom), Labor History, Social Science History, and Women Historians of the Midwest Newsletter. In 2004, Faue received the first LAWCHA award for service to labor and working-class history. As a feminist historian, she has participated in interdisciplinary efforts to expand the meanings of history; and she has been an active participant in developing the field of gender and women’s history.