S3E23 Jennifer Mittelstadt - Rutgers University

Today’s guest is the delightful historian of the military welfare state Jennifer Mittelstadt. Jen is Professor of History at Rutgers University. She completed her BA in History at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and her MA and PhD in History at the University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, she was an Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Penn State University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. In 2017-2018, Jen was the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College.

Jen is the author of From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1964 (North Carolina) and The Rise of the Military Welfare State⁠⁠ (Harvard). With Premilla Nadasen and Marisa Chappell, she is the co-author of Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents (Routledge) and also The Military and the Market (Penn), co-edited with Mark R. Wilson. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Policy History, and International Labor and Working-Class History, and she has contributed to numerous edited volumes. In addition, Jen has written for Jacobin, War on the Rocks, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Vox.

Jen’s research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Her Guggenheim funding supported her current research project, examining grassroots right-wing participation in US foreign policy. Jen is a member of the Coordinating Council on Women’s History, and she is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

In addition to her academic scholarship, Jennifer has co-produced at least four documentary films, including The War and Peace of Tim O’Brien, an official selection of the Sarasota Film Festival, Newport Beach Film Fest, and the St. Louis International Film Festival.

Join us for a whirlwind chat with Jen Mittelstadt. We’ll talk Milwaukee, writing Muppets books, the fate of getting into history, Stevie Wonder, amicus briefs, and even our first mention of the Italian edition of Vogue magazine! Thanks for listening!

Rec.: 07/25/2023