Joanne Meyerowitz

Historian Joanne Meyerowitz is the Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her primary areas of research are the 20th century; gender & sexuality; and global poverty

Her most recent book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (2021), won the Myrna Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. A history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s, it shows how and why anti-poverty efforts increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.

 She is also the author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2004), which won the Israel Fishman (Stonewall) Award from the American Library Association and ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for Non-Fiction GLBT, and Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1991). She’s the editor of History and September 11th (2003) and Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994). Her public writing has appeared in, among others, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, Public Seminar, TIME, and The Washington Post.

 Meyerowitz is a past president of the Organization of American Historians. She has won fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Social Science Research Council.  At the University of Cincinnati, she won the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and at Yale, she won the Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities.  

Meyerowitz received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2004, she taught at the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University, and for five years edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history.