Beth English is the executive director of the Organization of American Historians and adjunct associate professor at Indiana University. She is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century United States, with a particular focus on labor, gender, and workplace cultures. Her first book, A Common Thread: Labor, Politics and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry (UGA Press, Politics and Society in the Modern South Series, 2006), examines the relocation of the New England textile industry to the American South between 1880 and 1960 as a prelude to the industry relocations and related challenges faced by working people in the modern age of globalization. Her subsequent research including, “Better Work Beyond the Workplace: A Comparative Study of Gender Dynamics in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya, Lesotho and Vietnam,” (ILO, 2020), analyzes the historic roots of the gendered dynamics of normative labor standards in the global textile and garment industries that have been remarkably static across time and place. Global Women’s Work: Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Mary Frederickson and Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama, brings together the work of an interdisciplinary group of international scholars to consider how women shape the global economic landscape through their labor and activism.
Beth English
