Daniel Graff, Ph.D.
Professor of the Practice (SOCO/History)
Director, Higgins Labor Program
Email:
Office Phone:
574-631-5845
Office Address:
262 Geddes Hall
Contact For:
Professor of the Practice (SOCO/History)
Director, Higgins Labor Program
Daniel Graff is professor of the practice at the institute and, since 2014, has served as director of the Higgins Labor Program. Dedicated to encouraging the Notre Dame community to realize the centrality of labor questions to all human endeavors, Graff has initiated projects like the Labor Café and the Just Wage Working Group (with Professor Clemens Sedmak) at the institute.
Graff has written and published extensively on the histories of work, race, and citizenship in the United States, and his paper at the 2010 Collective Memory in St. Louis Symposium, “Lovejoy’s Legacies: Race, Religion, and Freedom in St. Louis (and American) Memory,” was awarded the Best Paper Prize. His current research projects include labor licensing codes of conduct in contemporary American universities; race, labor, and citizenship in nineteenth-century St. Louis; and representations of the chronic crisis facing workers in the United States since 1981.
Graff holds a joint faculty appointment as professor of the practice in the department of history, where he served as director of Undergraduate Studies for many years, winning a 2011 Edmund P. Joyce Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and a 2013 Dockweiler Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising. He offers courses in US labor and nineteenth-century history, including Labor & America since 1945, Abraham Lincoln’s America, US Labor History to 1945, Food, Work, & Power in American History, and Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle against Slavery.
Graff earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in U.S. history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and B.A. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.