Assistant Professor of History
Lake Forest College
batzell [at] lakeforest.edu
Bio and Interests
Rudi Batzell grew up in the rural Midwest of Michigan and Wisconsin, near the towns of Milan and East Troy. He graduated from Columbia University with a double major in History and Sociology in 2009. He then attended Cambridge University, Clare College, as a Kellett Fellow, where he completed an Mphil in Economic and Social History. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2017. During graduate school he helped lead the unionizing effort and served as a staff organizer for the UAW.
He is currently an Associate Professor in the History Department at Lake Forest College and lives in Chicago in the Rogers Park neighborhood. His interests are in the social history and politics of inequality, extending across the intersections of racism, gender, and class formation.
His first book, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870-1929 will be published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2025.
A second related book project is also nearing completion: Making Modern Inequality: Class, Patriarchy, and Racial Empire in American and British Capitalism, 1870-1930.
