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Officers


President | Sarah McNamara, Texas A&M University

Sarah McNamara is Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Latina/o/x & Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. McNamara’s research centers on Latinx, women and gender, immigration, and labor histories in the modern United States. Her first book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, examines the U.S. South as a transnational, multi-racial borderland and argues that in this space gender and sexuality played a central role in the (re)making of race, community, region, and nation.




Vice-President | Adrienne Petty, William & Mary University

Adrienne Petty is an associate professor of History at the College of William & Mary. Her scholarship analyzes the transformation of southern farming and rural life since the Civil War. Petty co-directs the oral history project “Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners.” She and the project’s co-director, Mark Schultz, are currently completing a history of African American farm owners that draws upon the collection of interviews. Petty is the author of Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (2013), winner of the H.L. Mitchell Book Award from the Southern Historical Association and the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award, presented by the Agricultural History Society. She is a past president of the Agricultural History Society and a Fellow of the society.


Past President | Max Krochmal, University of New Orleans

Max Krochmal is Professor of U.S. History, Czech Republic Endowed Professor in Justice and Director of the Ph.D. in Justice Studies at the University of New Orleans. He is the award-winning author of Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era and co-editor of Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas and Latinx Studies Curriculum in K-12 Schools: A Practical Guide. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, and a Fulbright-GarcĂ­a Robles Fellowship. AOAH Distinguished Lecturer, Krochmal was previously a history professor and the founding Chair of the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and at Texas Christian University.



Treasurer | Thomas Alter II, Texas State University, San Marcos

Tom Alter is an assistant professor of history at Texas State University where he specializes in labor, working-class, and Texas history. He is the author of Toward A Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022). He also has articles published on interactions between Texas Socialists and Mexican revolutionaries, the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike, and Occupy Wall Street.




Secretary | Alexandra Finley, University of Pittsburgh

Alexandra Finley is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches labor history, gender history, southern history, and African American history. Finley’s first book, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade was published by UNC Press in 2020. An Intimate Economy was based on her 2017 William & Mary dissertation, which won the Lerner Scott Prize from the OAH for the best dissertation in gender history. Finley has also published a chapter in the edited collection Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century and has an upcoming publication, “A Murder and Some Furniture: Gender, Value, and Household Objects in the early U.S.,” in an edited collection with the University of Chicago Press. She has received fellowships from the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Virginia Historical Society. Finley currently serves as the co-organizer of the University of Pittsburgh’s Alice and Staughton Lynd Working Class History Seminar and serves as a contributing editor to Labor.


Graduate Representative | Cole Wicker, University of Georgia

Cole Wicker is a Public Historian and a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of Georgia. As a practitioner-scholar, Cole readily engages his work with the public, examining racialized labor systems, dispossession, enslavement, carceral labor, and segregated space-making in and around public recreation sites. Cole proudly serves as the executive director of The Heart of Deep River Historical Society in Sanford, NC, and he eagerly serves on the board of the Athens Historical Society in Athens, GA. Cole received his BA in Cultural Anthropology and MA in Liberal Studies at Duke University.





CONTACT Southern Labor Studies Association 

c/o Max Krochmal

Department of History, LA 135

University of New Orleans

2000 Lakeshore Dr

New Orleans, LA 70148

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