Naomi R Williams

Naomi R Williams (they/them) received their PhD from the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their primary research interests include labor and working-class history, urban history and politics, gender and women, race and politics, and more broadly, social and economic movements of working people. Naomi focuses on worker voice and late-capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Naomi’s research also examines the ways working people impact local and national political economies and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi engages working-class history in urban settings, looking at low-wage service work, industrial employment, and workers in higher education.

Naomi’s research, service, and teaching are all interrelated and support their mission of being an engaged scholar-activist. Their first book A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, Jan 2025) uses life histories of union leaders and labor community resources to examine the transformation of class identity and politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Along with Sheri Davis-Faulkner, Tamara L. Lee, and Maite Tapia, Naomi co-edited A Racial Reckoning in Industrial Relations: Storytelling as Revolution from Within, by Cornell Press which showcases how CRT and Intersectionality can transform employment relations scholarship.

As part of their service in the Labor and Working-Class History Association, Naomi is a member of the contingent faculty committee. Research and interviews with contingent faculty led to a chapter (co-written with Jiyoon Park) titled “Building Labor Solidarity Across Tenure Lines” in Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (UIP 2024). This chapter argues that to save the public good function of higher education, cross-faculty organizing and mobilizing is necessary to protect the role of faculty and expand democracy in colleges and universities. It ends with a list of things tenure-stream faculty can do to improve the working conditions of all faculty members.

Naomi is committed to economic justice to help make the world a better place. Research, teaching and service all center on building inclusive communities through centering the voices of working people in their struggles for equity and a just economy and building and sustaining institutions to meet those goals.