Jeff Bloodworth is a professor of political history in the School of Public Service & Global Affairs at Gannon University (Erie, PA). A high school dropout reared in the Deep South and Ozarks, he took a circuitous path to academia.
As a political historian, he studies the history of contemporary American liberalism. He also teaches genocide studies. He has published widely on the travails of the liberal project, the history of humanitarian intervention, and the American foreign policy impulse abroad. He is currently midway through a biography of Speaker Carl Albert, who presided as Majority Leader during the Great Society and Civil Rights era and as Speaker during Watergate. Heartland Liberal is under contract with the University of Oklahoma Press.
In addition to his academic articles and books, his public-facing work has appeared in The Washington Post, Un-Herd, Liberal Patriot, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Wisconsin Magazine of History, Tikkun, The Free Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, & Philadelphia Inquirer. In his public-facing work, he writes about class, rural America, and American politics.
Class matters. We all understand that a child's exposure to educational opportunity, intensive parenting, and a nurturing environment plays a decisive role in their life trajectories. But a well intentioned impulse in academia to emphasize gender and race has pushed class, as a unit of analysis, out of the scholarly conversation. This talk will emphasize the necessity of understanding class in our scholarship, teaching, and retention efforts. This is not a zero sum game. Race and gender are important. But class matters.