Anna Stroinski

Fulbright-Durham University Postgraduate Award - MA in History

Anna Stroinski graduated summa cum laude from Boston University with majors in history and philosophy in 2019. The proud daughter of working-class Polish emigres to the United States, she is committed to creating a fairer, more equitable world for workers through political organizing and historical scholarship. The contemporary labor movement, she believes, can learn from its past successes and failures as well as the individual experiences of workers who have lived through and thought a lot about things like mechanization, unionization, and deindustrialization. Anna studies the intersections of labor, political, and intellectual history with a focus on ideas about work, the workplace, and inequality.

Her undergraduate thesis looked at how middle class townspeople weaponized conceptions of community against strike leadership but also federal investigators, mainstream journalists, and Pinkerton guards during the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike. On Fulbright, she will pursue a MA in Modern History at Durham University. Her dissertation project will examine the intellectual history of the labor strike between 1870 and 1914 with a focus on coal miners’ strikes in the US and the UK. Anna is very much looking forward to visiting the Beamish Museum, learning more about Durham’s local history, and sampling traditional northeast English dishes!