Daniel A. Graff
Associate Special Professional Faculty
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Field
United States, Labor, 19th-century, Race, Gender, Politics
Profile
A native of Granite City, Illinois, a once-grand steel town just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Dan Graff earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he combined his love of the past and interest in science by majoring in history while working as a research assistant for an evolutionary ecologist. After graduation, he spent a summer in Alaska amongst birds and bears before devoting full time to history as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history in 2004. While in Madison he became active in the Teaching Assistants' Association (AFT #3220) and eventually served a year as co-president; he also served on the staff of the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, an organization providing solidarity to the community of Arcatao, El Salvador, which was rebuilding itself in the wake of that country's civil war. These experiences in the labor movement and community activism fueled Graff's passion for studying the intersection of social and political history, in particular the relationship between economic change, social protest, and political structure.
Graff's dissertation explored these themes in early American St. Louis, a city at the crossroads of east and west, north and south, and slavery and freedom in the decades after the Louisiana Purchase. He has published one article drawn from this dissertation, and he is currently revising the dissertation for eventual publication. He has been on the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame since 2001, serving first as Associate Director and currently as Director of Undergraduate Studies, where he coordinates all aspects of the undergraduate program, from curricular matters to major advising to the department's honors program. He lives in South Bend with his wife, Nicole MacLaughlin, and their two young and feisty daughters.
Current Project
Graff’s primary project involves revising for publication his dissertation on labor and race in early American St. Louis. As part of that process, he is presenting papers at the Western Historical Association conference in October 2006 and at the Newberry Library in March 2007. Both papers will focus on questions of race and violence as they relate to the boundaries of labor solidarity during the rapid commercialization and intense early industrialization of St. Louis in the 1830s. He is also beginning other projects, one that explores questions of gender and the twentieth-century American labor movement, and another that revisits the Missouri Compromise of 1820-1821.
Teaching Interests
Graff generally rotates between courses on labor history and those on nineteenth-century United States history more generally (particularly Jacksonian America). This fall he is teaching a new course entitled "Labor and America since 1945," while next spring he hopes to offer an undergraduate research seminar on the right to vote in American history.
Recent Publications
“Race, Citizenship, and the Origins of Organized Labor in Antebellum St. Louis,” in Thomas Spencer, ed., The Other Missouri History (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004).
Contact
Office: 219 O'Shaughnessy Hall
Phone: (574) 631-5733
Email: graff.4@nd.edu
Office Hours: walk-ins and appointments M, T, W, and R