Professor Director, Applied History Certificate Program Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (she/her/hers) is a historian of the US after Reconstruction and the director of UGA’s Applied History Certificate Program. Shermer is broadly interested in political economy and will accept graduate students curious about the history of capitalism, labor history, business history, the history of public policy, applied history, intellectual history, regional histories, or other related fields. She has held fellowships and teaching positions across North America and Western Europe, which have supported her research, whether published in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, or books. Her most recent book is Indentured Students, a history of the federal laws and policies that intentionally created the student loan industry. Her forthcoming Business of Education will focus on campuses to show that all US colleges, including sprawling public universities, have had to hustle for state, federal, and private funding, even at the apogee of federal investment in the 1960s. That work on higher education grew out of her well-regarded first book, Sunbelt Capitalism, which looked at the policies and politics behind the movement of manufacturers, jobs, and people from the Steelbelt to the Sunbelt. Her next project will be on the US paystub, whose many individual deductions together show how much basic citizenship rights remained tied to the jobs that citizens, or their spouses and children have. She published a preview of that work for Time’s reporting on Labor Day. Research Research Areas: Capitalism and Economics U.S. 19th & 20th Century Political & Legal Cultural & Intellectual U.S. South U.S. West Education Education: PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009 MA, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005 BA, University of Virginia, 2003
