Maia Silber

I study labor history, urban history, and the history of the family in the 20th-century United States. My scholarship has been published in The Journal of Urban History and The History Workshop Journal.
My dissertation, prospectively titled, "A Day’s Work: Casual Employment in Postwar America," examines the persistence of precarious labor arrangements in an era typically characterized as a high-point of employment security. For most of capitalism’s history, low-wage, temporary employment was the norm—only with mass industrial unionization did a relatively large portion of America's workforce gain access to more permanent positions. Yet even at the high point of union density, and even within heavily organized industries, many workers continued to move between irregular, informal jobs. My research on how economic precarity shaped labor policy, organizing, and the everyday experience of postwar workers across economic sectors and geographic regions is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation.
Previously, I received an M.Phil in British and European History from the University of Oxford, where I was a Rhodes Scholar. Before that, I received a B.A. from Harvard College in History and Literature. I also write criticism and commentary, with recent work appearing in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Jacobin, Public Books, Psyche, The Harvard Review, and The Chicago Review.