Faculty - Dr. Elizabeth McKillen
Professor of History
207-581-1912
140 Stevens Hall
E-mail: Elizabeth.McKillen@umit.maine.edu
My teaching and research specialties are in the history of U.S. foreign relations and U.S. labor history. Since coming to the University of Maine in 1992, I have regularly taught the two semester sequence in the history of U.S. foreign relations (HTY 473-474), U.S. labor history ( HTY 477), and the second half of the U.S. history survey (HTY 104). I also offer graduate courses in U.S. foreign relations and labor history, and have taught the senior seminar (HTY 498), and a seminar in immigration history. My research explores the importance of international political and economic issues in shaping both the workplace struggles and political subcultures of immigrant and native-born U.S. workers and considers the myriad ways in which U.S. workers have tried to exert international influence. My research on workers and international affairs in the Mexican borderlands during World War I was funded by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Representative Publications:
- Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
- “Beyond Gompers: The American Federation of Labor, the Creation of the International Labour Organization, and U.S. Labor Dissent,” in ILO Histories: Essays on the International Labour Organization and its Impact on the World During the Twentieth Century, eds. Jasmien Van Daele, Magaly Rodríguez García, Geert Van Goethem, and Marcel van der Linden (Brussels, Peter Lang, 2010): 41-66.
- “Integrating Labor into the Narrative of Wilsonian Internationalism,” in a special forum on “Workers, Labor, and War: New Directions in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 34 (September 2010): 641-662. Also introducer and coordinator of the forum.
- “Pacifist Brawn and Silk-Stocking Militarism :Labor, Gender and Antiwar Politics, 1914-1918,” Peace and Change, 33 (July 2008): 388-425.
- Hybrid Visions: Working-Class Internationalism in the Mexican Borderlands, Seattle, and Chicago, 1910-1920,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2:1 (Winter 2005): 77-107.
- “Organized Labor,” in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., Alexander DeConde, et al., eds. (New York: Scribner, 2002): 45-60.
- “Ethnicity, Class, and Wilsonian Internationalism Reconsidered: The Mexican- and Irish-American Immigrant Left and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1914-1922,” Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 553-87.
- “American Labor, the Irish Revolution, and the Campaign for a Boycott of British Goods, 1916-1924,” in Radical History Review 61 (Winter 1995), 35-61.
- “The Corporatist Model, World War I, and the Public Debate over the League of Nations Battle,” Diplomatic History 15 (Spring 1991): 171-197.
Book reviews and other articles in Journal of American History, Labor History, International Labor and Working Class History, Diplomatic History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Eire-Ireland, and Business History Review. Encyclopedia entries in The Oxford Companion to United States History, The Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, The Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, and The Encyclopedia of Chicago History.
Current Projects:
- Currently at work on a book on U.S. Labor, the Immigrant Left and Wilsonian Internationalism that is under contract at University of Illinois Press.
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