Aimee Loiselle

Teaching Fields

Degrees

• PhD, University of Connecticut, 2019
• MA, University of Vermont, 1998
• BA, Dartmouth College, 1992

Research Interests

Aimee Loiselle's research interests span working-class women and their navigation of job conditions, low-wage workers in global labor systems, and the power of popular culture in political-economic contests. In ongoing competition over the terms of globalization, she frames the United States as a hub for labor and capital and highlights women, gender, race, and citizenship. Dr. Loiselle has a particular interest in the political-economic position of the South and Appalachia and the diverse women working and organizing there during the late twentieth century. Her first book, Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), uses the 1979 movie Norma Rae as a portal into the history of women in U.S. textile and apparel manufacturing from 1900 to 1985. She argues that U.S. government offices and businesses incorporated women of the New South and Puerto Rico into manufacturing in distinct yet interrelated ways. Gender, race, and citizenship intersected in the structures and in the workers' migrations and resistance. Despite these complexities, a fascination with “poor white southerners” led media in the 1970s to focus on Crystal Lee Sutton, a North Carolina mill hand and union member. Hollywood producers used her life story for a 1977 script, “Crystal Lee."

An examination of the subsequent Norma Rae production dissects how popular culture business works to rearticulate familiar meanings and obscure social complexities. Hollywood professionals removed Sutton when her insistence on the collective effort of many workers did not suit their commercial ambitions. Norma Rae recycled the narrative of the American working class as tough, white individuals, which helped to erase Puerto Rican needleworkers, southern Black organizers, and the history of globalization. Dr. Loiselle is working on a second book, tentatively titled Hip-Hop Empire: Kimora Lee and Women Workers Make Baby Phat. She is researching the financial, manufacturing, and shipping systems from 1964 to 2019 that served hip-hop lifestyle companies. Workers include women on the line in the factories of the South and Bangladesh and models on the runways of Atlanta and London. The project continues her interest in popular narrative -- in this case, the notion that "entrepreneurs make it on their own," which obscured their dependence on transnational finance and women workers in supply chains cultivated by U.S. imperialism.

Courses Offered

• HIST 773 Readings in Appalachian Regional History
• HIST 484 Capstone Seminar in Modern U.S. History

Publications

Books

• Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class, University of North Carolina Press, 2023

Journal Articles and Book Chapters  

• “Women Manufacturing Workers: At a Junction of the Labor Movement and Feminist Activism,” Radical in the Ordinary: Women's Activism in Everyday Life, deGruyter Press, Germany, 2026.
• “Multiple Contingencies.” Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History, University of Illinois Press, Working Class in American History Series, 2024.
• “U.S. Imperialism and Puerto Rican Needleworkers: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Women’s Labor in a Deep History of Neoliberal Trade.” International Labor and Working-Class History 98 (Fall 2020): 142-172.
• “Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Colonial Migrations: Deindustrialization as Pathways Lost.” Journal of Working-Class Studies 4 (Dec 2019): 40-54.
• “Austerity Undermines Every Effort at Equity and Justice.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color (Spring 2018): 57-62.

  Essays

• Co-author with Eileen Boris and Jennifer Mittelstadt, “Feminist Scholars Demand Higher Education for All,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 52 (Spr/Sum 2024): 157-165.
• “Fighting Distortions and Erasures: Working Women in Mainstream Media Production,” The American Historian, Organization of American Historians (OAH), June 2023.
• “Not a Crisis for Contingents, A Crisis of Contingency for the Entire Field,” The American Historian, OAH, Feb 2023.
• “Portraying Women Workers: Beyond Norma Rae,” World History Commons, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, George Mason University, 2022.
• “The Link Between 2021’s ‘Stillwater’ and 1979’s ‘Norma Rae’,” Made by History, Washington Post, Aug 23, 2021.
• “Puerto Rican Needleworkers: A Laboratory for Neoliberalism.” El Sol Latino, May 2017, 4.

  Grants and Awards

• Peter C. Rollins Book Prize, Northeast Popular Culture Association, 2023
• Faculty Fellowship, Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Yale University, 2021-2022
• Catherine Prelinger Award, Coordinating Council for Women in History, 2020
• Lerner-Scott Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2020
• Dissertation Fellowship, Humanities Institute, UConn, 2018-2019
• Outstanding Paper Award, American Political History Institute Graduate Conference, Boston University, 2017
• Research Award, Caribbean Interdisciplinary Initiative: Africana Studies Institute and El Instituto, UConn, 2017
• Research Award, El Instituto, UConn, 2017 and 2015
• 100 Years of Women Award, Women’s Center, UConn, 2015-2016
• Stave Prize in Recent U.S. History, History Department, UConn, 2014
• Outstanding Scholars Program Fellowship, History Department, UConn, 2012-2015
• Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Vermont, University of Vermont, 1998
• Thompson-Bickford Fellowship, History Department, University of Vermont, 1996-1998