Associate Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

Education

Save Higher Education (From Itself)!

A federal bailout for students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities

July 1, 2020 • by Julia Ott

More than three months into a national emergency, neither the leaders of America’s colleges and universities nor our elected officials have offered any plan to uphold higher education or any vision for its future. The ad-hoc responses of individual institutions do not suffice. Without federal relief and concerted reform, our ...

Multi Media

Clean In

How Hotel Workers Fought For a Union — And Won

May 30, 2017 • by Julia Ott

Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and The Nation Magazine present 'What does a feminism for the 99% look like? Ask the hotel housekeepers who unionized a Doubletree hotel owned by Harvard. These women fought the first female president of Harvard to gain a union. They asked Sheryl Sandberg to "lean ...

Education

Slavery, Race, Capitalism

A collaborative course and syllabus from Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies

April 18, 2017 • by Julia Ott

A course offering from the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, co-designed and co-taught by Julia Ott, Mia White, Alana Lentin, Kris Manjapra, Fred Cooper, Janet Roitman, Darrick Hamilton, Terry Williams, Nathan Connolly, Shirley Thompson, Ujju Aggarwal, Natasha Iskander, and Nicholas Fiori. Overview Historians' recent investigations of the centrality of racialized chattel ...

Feature

I WILL NOT 3/8/17

Responses from the Women’s Strike

March 8, 2017 • by Julia Ott

Previous Women Strike posts include, Beyond Lean-in and Call to Participate in International Women's Strike Responses by: ...Shut up and smile -- by Mayra Cotta ...Lean in -- by Julienne Obadiah ...Defer to others’ definition of ‘strike’ -- by Cinzia Arruzza ...Accept refusals of my union -- by Sidra Kamran ...Accept institutional hypocrisy -- by Indigo Olivier ...Feel guilty -- by Chiara Bottici ...Publish this ...

Feature

Trumpism – How Should the Left Respond?

Dissent Editors and Contributors Debate how the Left can defeat Trump

February 10, 2017 • by Julia Ott

Dissent editors and contributors debated how the left can defeat Trumpism. Featuring: Bhaskar Sunkara is editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine. Nancy Fraser is a professor of philosophy and politics at The New School for Social Research and author, most recently, of Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal ...

Feature

#PurpleReigns: A Tribute to Prince

October 21, 2016 • by Julia Ott, Simon Critchley, Deva Woodly, Ricky Tucker, Claire Potter and Alyson Palmer

On September 23rd, Pam Tillis, Director of Public Programs for the New School for Public Engagement organized a tribute to Prince inspired by the Black Lives Matter’s hashtag entitled, #PurpleReigns: A Tribute to Prince. Leading the crowd in celebration were musician Alyson Palmer from the band BETTY, guitarist Mishti Roy, dancer Darlene Arrington, Ricky Tucker, ...

Race

Prince’s Little Red Corvette

October 21, 2016 • by Julia Ott

This submissions was part of the #PurpleReigns: A Tribute to Prince event hosted at the New School, Friday, September 23rd. My Facebook feed filled with amazing stories after Prince died. Revelations sparked by his songs; his mystique. Transformations sparked by fleeting encounters with the enigmatic Artist. But I hesitated to share my ...

Race

Slaves: The Capital that Made Capitalism

A re-post

August 20, 2015 • by Julia Ott

This post, adapted from a lecture in the team-taught course "Rethinking Capitalism" at The New School for Social Research and first published last year, is being reposted today to provide critical insight into today's headlines. Slavery was central to the development of the American political economy. Ott reviews the recent ...

Uncategorized

Capitalism Studies: A Manifesto

April 17, 2014 • by Julia Ott and William Milberg

It seems odd now to recall that up until a few years ago, the concept of capitalism largely had fallen out of favor as a subject of academic inquiry and critique. Most scholars in the humanities and social sciences regarded the term as too broad, too vague, too encumbered by ...

Race

Slaves

The capital that made capitalism

April 9, 2014 • by Julia Ott

Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism. While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage, new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation ...