Rate My Professor Erik Gellman

Erik S. Gellman is a Professor in the History department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned a BA from Bates College in 1997, an MA from Northwestern University in 2000, and a PhD from Northwestern University in 2006. Prior to joining UNC Chapel Hill, he taught History and African American Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago from 2006 to 2018.

Gellman researches and teaches about working-class and urban life, visual culture, and comparative social movements in modern American history. He is the author of Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (UNC Press, 2012) and coauthor with Jarod Roll of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (University of Illinois Press, 2011), which received the H.L. Mitchell Prize of the Southern Historical Association in 2012. His most recent book is Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He is collaborating on an edited volume titled New Black Chicago Histories and a project called Organizing Agribusiness from Farm to Factory: A New Food and Labor History of America’s Most Diverse Union (forthcoming from UNC Press). Gellman serves as contributing editor to Labor: Studies in Working-Class History and as national secretary for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). He also serves as vice president of the UNC Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors.