Executive Board

Jarod Roll | University of Mississippi

Jarod Roll is a professor of history at the University of Mississippi. His scholarship focuses on workers at the margins of organized labor in the United States after 1865, particularly in agricultural and rural-industrial settings, with an emphasis on working-class social and economic thought. He is the author of three prize-winning books: Poor Man’s Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (University of Illinois Press, 2010), and, with coauthor Erik Gellman, The Gospel of the Working-Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (University of Illinois Press, 2011). He is currently working on a collaborative project with Erik Gellman, Max Krochmal, and Sarah McNamara to write a national history of UCAPAWA-FTA, the CIO’s Communist-led agribusiness union, from the 1930s to the 1950s. He is a member of United Campus Workers of Mississippi.

Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez | Emory University

Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Emory University. Her scholarship focuses on U.S. Latinx communities through questions of race, ethnicity, labor, and migration. With a regional focus on the U.S. South, Rodriguez’s work examines Latinx histories alongside ethnic political, economic, and cultural place-making practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current manuscript project, “Mexican Atlanta: Migrant Place-Making in the Latinx South,” traces the history of Metro Atlanta’s Mexican community formation since the 1970s. Rodriguez is committed to archive building and public scholarship that center marginalized histories. To this end, she is currently working with the University of Georgia to record and archive oral histories for the Latinx Georgia Oral History Project.

Joshua Hollands | University College London

Joshua Hollands is a lecturer in United States History at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2019. Josh’s research interests lie at the intersection of sexuality, class, gender and race in the post-1945 United States. His recently completed PhD thesis examines histories of homophobic workplace discrimination in the US South and Southwest, and the movements that emerged to counter it. Each chapter of his thesis, entitled: Work and Sexuality in the Sunbelt: Homophobic Workplace Discrimination in the US South and Southwest, 1970 to the present, examine episodes of discrimination in different Sunbelt cities and companies. Chapters focused on individual organisations such as Apple Computer, Cracker Barrel, Duke University and ExxonMobil shed light on mainstream LGBT strategies for equality within corporations, as well as the extent to which victories at these companies impacted wider rights for sexual minorities in southern cities. Similarly, case studies on organisations of business elites in Sunbelt cities including Houston and Williamson County, Texas, demonstrate how battles over workplace rights in both the private and public sectors informed conservative rhetoric in opposition to, and in some cases, acceptance of LGBT rights during the closing decades of the twentieth-century.

In 2017, Josh was awarded the Robert H. Zieger Prize for Southern Labor Studies for research on discrimination at the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. He was also a finalist for the Business History Conference’s 2021 Krooss Prize, and is the recipient of the Labor and Working Class History Association’s 2021 Herbert G. Gutman Dissertation Prize. He is currently working on his first book, which will be published as part of the Working Class in American History series of the University of Illinois Press. During the 2021–22 academic year, Josh is a Fulbright Scholar at Elon University in North Carolina. He is also a member of the UCL branch of the University and College Union (UCU).