Curriculum Vitae

Rachel Meyer is a Pre-Concentration Academic Advisor and Head Preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard University. Her areas of interest include social movements, social class, labor movements, political sociology, social change, culture and identity, labor and work, globalization, U.S. labor history, and qualitative methods.

She received a B.A. in Anthropology (1992) and an M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2008) in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Previous positions in Harvard’s Department of Sociology include Lecturer, Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Harvard College Fellow.  She has taught in Harvard Extension School.

Meyer’s research explores the relationship between political economy and working-class mobilization. She is interested in precarious workers, neoliberalism, and social change. Her focus is on how collective action experiences transform working-class consciousness and subjectivity with attention to organizing trends in the American labor movement, including living wage campaigns. She has published on 1) precarious workers’ subjectivity; 2) working-class mobilizations targeting the state; 3) the subjective consequences of local political mobilization; 4) events and the subjective consequences of collective action, using a historical sociological perspective (with Howard Kimeldorf); and 5) the grassroots political mobilization of immigrants in the U.S. (with Janice Fine). She has also published on the extent and sources of ethical consumption with respect to sweatshops and workers’ rights with colleagues at the University of Michigan.  Meyer is currently working on a project about the relationship between workplace and community in the mid-20^th century American labor movement. 

Meyer has received awards for her papers from both the Labor and Labor and Labor Movements Section and the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association, and for Best Graduate Student Paper at the University of Michigan.