Book Talk | Tejasvi Nagaraja | Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Thursday, September 24 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Tejasvi Nagaraja. He will discuss his book, Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II, with Adrian De Leon and Ruth Milkman.
Tejasvi Nagaraja is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He received his Ph.D. from New York University, and has held fellowships at Harvard University, the New School, and the New York Historical Society. His writing has been published in the journal American Historical Review. Nagaraja’s research and teaching explores the intersections of U.S. labor and African American and foreign relations history. Investigating both ‘top-down’ public policy and ‘bottom-up’ social movements, his work considers how class, gender and race evolve within a changing global division of labor and geopolitics. As a scholar of empire, he interprets the United States both in and of the world, across both connection and comparison, especially through a focus on war and the military. As a historian of labor and racial capitalism, he finds the study of social movements particularly illuminating. In addition to labor and working-class history, Nagaraja’s teaching has highlighted the Black freedom movement and U.S. wars, including interdisciplinary courses on global capitalism, on race and war — as well as, gender and geopolitics; the military- and prison- industrial complex; freedom struggles in geopolitics; intersectional and international social movements.
Adrian De Leónis an Assistant Professor of U.S. History at NYU and co-chair of Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative. His work examines Filipino diasporic experiences and their intersections with empire and nation-states. He is the author and editor of six books, including Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (2023) and Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland (2026), and has written extensively for major public outlets. De León has received numerous awards for his scholarship and public history work, including the Engaged Scholar Award (2022), and serves as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.
Ruth Milkman is a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her most recent books are: Immigration Matters (co-edited with Deepak Bhargava and Penny Lewis, New Press, 2021), Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity, 2020), and On Gender, Labor and Inequality (Illinois, 2016). Her early research focused on the impact on U.S. women workers of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s. She went on to study the restructuring of the U.S. automobile industry and its impact on workers and their union in the 1980s and 1990s; in that period she also analyzed the labor practices of Japanese-owned factories in California. More recently she has written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. She co-authored a 2013 study of California’s paid family leave program, focusing on its impact on employers and workers. She served as the 2016 President of the American Sociological Association; her presidential address focused on Millennial-generation social movements. She has also conducted extensive policy-oriented research on such topics as wage theft, unionization trends, paid sick leave, the aging workforce, and U.S. home care workers. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and History at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.