Premilla Nadasen
Department
History
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Premilla Nadasen joined the faculty of Barnard in 2013, after teaching for fifteen years at Queens College, CUNY. She specializes in twentieth-century U.S. social movements, labor history, gender, poverty and race. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing, and is most interested in visions of social change and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color fought for social justice. Her most recent book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket 2023), chronicles the rise of the care economy, its roots in racial capitalism, and the shifting nature of capitalist profit making. She is also the author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon 2015), which examines the role of history, memory, and storytelling in building a movement for domestic workers rights, and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005), which chronicles the emergence of a distinctive brand of feminism forged by Black women on welfare. She is currently writing a biography of South African performer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba, tentatively titled: Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Transnational Black Solidarity.
Nadasen has been involved in social justice organizing for decades, collaborated with grassroots organizations, and made her research accessible and available to people beyond the academy. She has written for the Washington Post, The Root, Al Jazeera, Ms. Magazine, and appeared on CBS, CNN, the Melissa Harris-Perry Show and multiple other news outlets. She worked with multiple museums, collaborated with the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and served as expert witness before the New York State Assembly Committee on Labor and the federal Department of Labor. She has long term partnerships with Damayan Migrant Workers Association and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and has taught courses with both organizations. In 2020 she was awarded the inaugural Ann Snitow Prize, and in 2023 named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar for her activism and scholarly contributions to social justice work. From 2018-2020 she served as president of the National Women’s Studies Association.
- B.A., University of Michigan, 1989
- M.A., Ph.D. Columbia University, 1998
- Women’s and Gender History
- Labor, Poverty and Welfare
- Social Movements
- Transnational Feminism
- Community Engagement
- The Anti-Apartheid Movement: A Global Perspective
- Women, Race, and Class
- Transnational Black Feminisms
- Building Migrant Worker Power
- Poverty Race and Gender
- Mississippi Semester
- Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, 2027
- Charles Warren Center Residential Fellowship, Harvard, 2025-2026
- Courageous Voices Award, Scholars for Social Justice, 2025
- Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar, 2023
- Inducted into Society of American Historians, 2023
- Columbia Center for Political Economy Grant, 2023
- Heyman Center Fellow, Columbia University, 2022-2023
- Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, 2022
- Ann Snitow Prize, 2021
- Senior Fellow, Academy of Fellows, Pulse Institute, Detroit, 2020
- Co-PI, Mellon Public Engagement Initiative, Barnard, 2019-2024
- Fulbright Visiting Professorship, Oxford, 2019
- Transnational Black Feminisms, Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia, 2018-2023
- Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2016
- Mellon Residential Faculty Fellowship, Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center, 2011–2012
- Center for Place, Culture and Politics Faculty Fellowship, CUNY Graduate Center, 2010-2011
Publications
Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket, 2023)
- Audiobooks (2025)
- Catalan edition (2026)
Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon Press, 2015)
- Sara A. Whaley Book Prize
- Darlene Clark Hine Book Award (honorable mention)
- Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award (honorable mention)
Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement (Routledge, 2012)
Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents, co-authored with Jennifer Mittelstadt and Marisa Chappell (Routledge, 2009)
Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge, 2005)
- John Hope Franklin Prize
Scholar and Feminist Online Special Issue on “Care”. Guest Edited with Alex Pittman, Spring 2026
“How Capitalism Invented the Care Economy” Care: The Feminist Bookshelf: Ideas for the 21st Century, ed. Sarah Tobias, Rutgers University Press, 2026
“Racial Capitalism, the Politics of Care, and People as Profit” in Political Modernity at the Crossroads: Multiple Crises, The State, Democracy and Social Identities, ed. Sofia Aboim, Felipe Carreira da Silva, and Jose Mauricio Domingues, Routledge, 2026
“Le capitalisme à son apogee” in à babord! Social and Political Review, Quebec, May 2025
“Care, Profit, and the Politics of Race” Roundtable on Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism with responses by Tithi Bhattacharya, LaKisha Simmons, Jocelyn Olcott, and Joan Flores-Villalobos, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, 2025
“Dobbs and the Politics of Reproduction” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fall 2022.
“Rethinking Care Work: (Dis)Affection and the Politics of Caring,” Feminist Formations, Spring 2021
“Pedagogy and the Politics of Organizing in Mississippi” Radical Teacher, Fall 2020
“Mississippi Semester: New Social Justice Approach to Teaching, Learning, and Community Engagement” with Fatima Koli, Alisa Rod, David Weiman, Numeracy, January 2019
“Domestic Workers” in City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York City, ed. Joshua B. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2019
“Rethinking Care: Arlie Hochschild and the Global Care Chain” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fall 2017
“Domestic Worker Organizing: Storytelling, History and Contemporary Resonances” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Spring 2016
International Labor and Working-Class History Journal, Special Issue on “Organizing Domestic Labor” guest editor with Eileen Boris. Fall 2015
“Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act” Journal of Policy History (January 2012)
“Is it Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor” Kathleen Laughlin, Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Eileen Boris, Premilla Nadasen, Stephanie Gilmore, and Leandra Zarnow Feminist Formations, (Spring 2010).
“Power, Intimacy, and Contestation: Dorothy Bolden and Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta in the 1960s” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parrenas (Stanford University Press, 2010)
“Sista’ Friends and Other Allies: Domestic Workers United” in New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid, ed. Leith Mullings (Palgrave MacMillan 2009)
“We Do Whatever Becomes Necessary: Johnnie Tillmon, Welfare Rights, and Black Power” in Want to Start a Revolution?: Women in the Black Revolt, ed. Jeanne Theoharis, Dayo Gore, and Komozi Woodard (NYU Press, 2009)
“Domestic Workers Organize!” with Eileen Boris in Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society (December 2008)
“’Welfare’s A Green Problem’: Cross-Race Coalitions in the Welfare Rights Movement” in Feminist Coalitions, ed. Stephanie Gilmore (University of Illinois Press, 2008)
“From Widow to ‘Welfare Queen’: Welfare and the Politics of Race” Black Women, Gender, and Families, (Fall 2007)
"Expanding the Boundaries of the Women's Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights" Feminist Studies (Summer 2002)
“How Capitalism Invented the Care Economy” The Nation, July 2021
“Movement for Black Lives: Roundtable on History,” In These Times, June 2021
“When Times are Tough, Tax Credits are not Enough” In These Times, April 2021
“How did Feminism Come to Include Everything from Environmentalism to Palestinian Rights” Washington Post, February 1, 2019
“Black Feminism Will Save Us All” In These Times, November 11, 2018
“Extreme Poverty Returns to America” Washington Post, December 21, 2017
“Interrogating the Master Narrative of ‘My Family’s Slave’” Black Perspectives, June 2, 2017
“Care Deficit” Dissent, Fall 2016
“Twenty Years After Welfare Reform: The Fight to Destigmatize Poor Black Mothers Continues” In These Times, August 22, 2016
“From Exclusion to Criminalization: Bill Clinton, Welfare and the Third Way” Jacobin, Spring 2016
“When States Run Welfare, Black Children are the Ones who get Hurt” The Root, Feb. 9, 2016
“Domestic Workers’ Rights, the Politics of Social Reproduction, and New Models of Labor Organizing” Viewpoint Magazine, December 2015
“Recognizing the Household Workers on the Front Lines of Protest, Montgomery, 1955” The Root, November 23, 2015
“Anything But Secure: Federal Programs Designed to Nab Criminals Is Devastating Immigrant Families,” Ms. Magazine, Winter 2012
“Domestic Workers Take it to the Streets,” Ms. Magazine, Fall 2009: 38-40. (Reprinted in Utne Reader, “Meet the New Nanny,” March-April 2010