Cindy Hahamovitch, B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of Southern History in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a 2021 Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Hahamovitch is one of 184 artists, writers, scholars and scientistschosen through a rigorous peer-review process from almost 3,000 applicants.
Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
A scholar of Southern, immigration and labor history in a global context, Hahamovitch is the author of two books: “The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945” (UNC Press, 1997) and “No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor” (Princeton University Press). A former Fulbright Fellow and the John E. Sawyer Fellow at the National Humanities Center, she is the past president of the Southern Labor Studies Association and the reviews editor for LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History.
Hahamovitch’s Fellowship project will build on her existing scholarship to explore the guest worker programs and human trafficking in a global context. While her first book tells the story of farmers’ use of migrant workers in the U.S. through the second world war, her second book picks up with guest worker program, especially the use of deportation as a labor discipline tool, in the post-war period.