On Leave Academic Year 2023-2024

Joel Suarez is a historian of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century United States with interests in labor history, political economy, and the social history of ideas. He is currently completing his first book, The Labor of Liberty: Work and the Problem of Freedom in American History. The book examines how ideas about freedom became associated with work and how that relationship—as well as the meanings of those concepts themselves—changed amid the social transformations wrought by abolition, industrialization, deindustrialization, and the ascent of informal and low-wage service sector work.

His second book project examines the changing nature and meaning of the family. Conceived as a global labor history of the Volcker Shock, this project explores the transformation of working-class families in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the United States amid the abrupt and profound turmoil caused by the sharp rise in interest rates in the early 1980s. Through a social history of the idea of the family, this book will examine how deindustrialization and debt crises reconstituted the discourse, social formation, and political meaning of the family.

He teaches courses on labor history, intellectual history, and social theory in the Department of History and for the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. He received his PhD in history from Princeton University and prior to Harvard taught at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.