Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham is an associate professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the recipient of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Sara A. Whaley Book Prize for outstanding monographs on women’s laborhistory for Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Her forthcoming book is a labor history about civil rights and women’s rights leader Nannie Helen Burroughs and her National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World will be published by Georgetown University Press in February 2025.
As an executive board member of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), Dr. Phillips-Cunningham enjoys making women’s labor and migration histories accessible. Her articles about Nannie Helen Burroughs and the history of southern Black women’s organizing were published by The Washington Post. Dr. Phillips-Cunningham was the co-principal investigator of Quakertown Stories, a National Endowment for the Humanities public history and curriculum project. While co-directing the project, she co-authored articles with descendants of Quakertown, an independent Black town established in Texas after Juneteenth. She is also a research consultant for a Pew Center for the Arts & Heritage funded project about the history of domestic workers at the Cliveden of National Trust in Philadelphia. Dr. Phillips-Cunningham co-designs and co-teaches “Women Taking The Lead: Race, Gender, and Labor” with Sheri Davis-Faulkner. Their class is the first cross-listed course between Spelman College, Rutgers University, Clark Atlanta University, and the Advancing Black Strategists Initiative.