Maia Silber

Visiting Scholar & Organizer | The Past and Future of Work

Headshot of Maia Silber.

Maia Silber is a PhD student in History at Princeton University. Her dissertation, Odd Jobs: Labor, Politics, and Precarity in Postwar America, examines a central tension of the New Deal order: the triumph of “security” as a structuring ideal for labor relations, and the persistence of precarious labor arrangements even among the workforces that enjoyed greater statutory protections. It asks how state officials and ordinary workers alike constructed and contested the categories of the “steady job” and its binary opposite, the “odd job,” in debates about the welfare state, wage and hour laws, collective bargaining rights, and immigration. Silber’s scholarship appears in The Journal of Urban History and The History Workshop Journal. She writes regularly for publications such as The New Yorker, The Washington PostPublic BooksJacobinPsycheThe Harvard Review, and The Chicago Review.

Join Our Mailing List