Faculty

Email: davidstein@g.ucla.edu

UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of African American Studies

David Stein is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies. Previously, he was the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His research focuses on the interconnection between social movements, public policy, and political economy in post-1865 U.S. history. His forthcoming book Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986 (University of North Carolina Press) describes the political economy of unemployment and efforts win a federal governmental job guarantee, and how this struggle impacted the ascent of mass incarceration.

He is also working on two new book projects. The first is about racial capitalism, the history of money, and the global history of gold mining. The second is about anti-racist and working-class resistance to neoliberalism as viewed through the lives of Coretta Scott King, Cleveland Robinson, Jerry Tucker, and James Haughton. 

He is committed to public scholarship and often writes for policy and popular audiences, and collaborates with social justice organizations. He also co-hosts and produces Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcastwith Alex Beasley.

  • Ph.D.  American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, 2014
  • M.A. American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, 2010
  • M.A. African American Studies, American Studies, Yale University, 2010
  • B.A. African American Studies, Sociology, Wesleyan University, 2006
  • African American Studies
  • The civil rights movement
  • Twentieth Century U.S. history
  • Labor and capitalism
  • Policing and imprisonment
  • U.S. and the world

Selected Book Chapters and Articles:

  • “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979.” Beyond the New Deal Order. Eds. Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor. University of Pennsylvania Press. (2019).
  • “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s.” Souls 18, no. 1 (March 2016): 80–105.
  • “A Spectre is Haunting Law and Society: Revisiting Radical Criminology at UC Berkeley.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order. Volume 40, Issue 1-2, 2014, P. 72-84.

Policy Reports:

Selected popular scholarship

  • Maria Stewart Prize for the best journal article in Black intellectual history published in 2015 or 2016 from the African American Intellectual History Society.