David R. Roediger

David Roediger
  • Foundation Professor
  • Interim Chair

Contact Info

213 Bailey Hall
Lawrence
1440 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence, KS 66045

Personal Links

Biography —

David Roediger is the Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas where he teaches and writes on race and class in the United States. Educated through college at public schools in Illinois, he completed doctoral work at Northwestern University. His recent books include Class, Race, and Marxism, Seizing Freedom, and (with Elizabeth Esch) The Production of Difference. His older writings on race, immigration, and working-class history include The Wages of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness.

Education —

B.S. in Education. Northern Illinois University, 1975.
Ph.D. in History. Northwestern University, 1980.

Research —

Professor Roediger's work focuses on race and class in the U.S. and the Atlantic world. His current project is a history off 400 years of portrayals of Friday, sometimes as Black and sometimes as indigenous, in the novel Robinson Crusoe.

Research interests:

  • labor
  • race
  • immigration
  • social movements

Teaching —

Professor Roediger offers a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses on literature, popular culture, work, gender, and race. All have the teaching of writing as a central goal.

Teaching interests:

  • Labor
  • Slavery
  • Management
  • Race

Selected Publications —

Roediger, David R., and Elizabeth Esch. 2012. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History. Oxford University Press.

How Race Survived United States History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Eclipse of Post-Racialism.

Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All. Verso, 2014. Paperback in 2015.

Class, Race, and Marxism. New York: Verso, 2017. Paperback in 2020.

Roediger, David R. 2022. The Sinking Middle Class. Haymarket Books.