Elizabeth Faue
Office Location
255 Walter P Reuther Library
Biography
Elizabeth Faue
Elizabeth Faue is Director of Labor@Wayne and the Employment and Labor Relations program and Professor in the Department of History at Wayne State University. She specializes in labor and working-class history and women’s and gender history. Her current research projects are on the activism of teachers and nurses and the idea of the public good and occupational health and safety; her interests include interdisciplinary and comparative work in labor and workplace studies. An internationally recognized scholar, she has devoted her career to teaching and research in the field, supporting students on the path from college to career, and organizing events and workshops for public outreach and education.
Recently, Elizabeth Faue received the Distinguished Service to Labor and Working Class History Award at the 2023 Labor and Working Class History Association meeting at Rutgers University. It was awarded in recognition of her work in diversifying and democratizing labor history through her work as coordinator of the North American Labor History Conference (1991-2003) and in her scholarship. In 2023, Faue became a member of the Academy of Scholars at Wayne State University. And in fall 2023, she was a visiting senior scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna working on her project, “Re-Discovering that Work Is Dangerous: Redefining Workplace Risk in the Late Twentieth Century.”
Faue’s publications include Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (1991), Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism (2002), and Rethinking the American Labor Movement (2017), as well as more than 200 articles, chapters, and book reviews. She edited special issues (Labor History 1993; Social Science History 2000) and the Encyclopedia of American History, volume 7 (2003; rev. ed. 2010). She served on editorial boards for International Labor and Working Class History, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Labour History (Australia), Labour History Review (U.K.), Workers of the World: International Journal of Strikes and Conflicts (Brazil), and Social Science History.
The daughter of union parents and, while faculty, a third-generation union member, Elizabeth Faue received her B.A. (1979) in English summa cum laude and her M.A. in history (1985) at the University of Minnesota before finishing her doctorate in 1987. A Susan B. Anthony Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Rochester from 1988-1990, she came to Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 1990. In 1993, she was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, and she became a full professor in 2002. She was Interim Associate Dean of the Graduate School (2007-2009), Director of Graduate Studies in History (2010-2015), and History Department Chair (2015-2023). She was appointed Director of Labor@Wayne in Fall 2022. She brings her experience and knowledge to the challenges of labor education (both degree- and non-credit, academic and public) in today's changing economic and political landscape.
Over the course of her career, Faue has been the recipient of many awards, including Board of Governors’ Faculty Recognition Award (1992, 2018), Career Development Chair (1995-96), Outstanding Graduate Mentor (2000), Charles H. Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2004-05), and the Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award (2018) at Wayne State University. Faue also was Visiting Senior Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1994-95) and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University (1995-96). She has excelled as an academic leader, especially in graduate education. She served in the Graduate School on the Graduate Council and as Interim Associate Dean. She chaired the Master’s Advisory Committee in 2013-2014. As lead co-PI she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Next Generation Humanities PhD planning grant, which created the WSU Humanities Clinic (established 2017). An advocate for graduate education, Faue has been a co-PI on Career Diversity grants from the American Historical Association and the Council of Graduate Schools grant on career pathways. She has a signal interest in interdisciplinary curriculum and in integrating internships into undergraduate and graduate degree programs.