Visiting Scholars

The Kalmanovitz Initiative welcomes Visiting Scholars to Georgetown to conduct research in line with our mission of advancing workers’ rights and economic justice.

2015-present

John Russo

John B. Russo joined the Kalmanovitz Initiative as a Visiting Scholar in 2015. At the KI, John will work with Georgetown faculty to design an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Working-Class Studies. John also brings to KI the long-running weekly blog, Working-Class Perspectives, which he edits with Georgetown English professor Sherry Linkon. In 2014, the blog was read by over 120,000 people around the world in more than 170 countries. John will also continue to serve as Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Institute, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, at Virginia Tech (Alexandria) where he is working on a critical analysis of urban planning, economic redevelopment efforts, and community organizing in Youngstown. Before moving to Washington, John was a founding member and Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. Along with conducting research on working-class history, labor studies, urban studies, and deindustrialization, he helped design and taught in the first certificate program in Working-Class Studies in the United States. Read more about John and his work.

2015-2016

John Beck, Visiting Researcher

John P. Beck is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Resources & Labor Relations at Michigan State University. He previously served as associate director of the School, primarily in charge of two of the School’s outreach units, the Labor Education Program and Union Management Initiatives. He also co-directs a project (with Karen Klomparens, the Dean of the MSU Graduate School), “Building Mutual Expectations and Resolving Conflicts in Graduate Education,” on the use of interest-based conflict resolution approaches for graduate students and their faculty mentors. John holds degrees from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. He worked for five years on the staff of the University of Michigan Labor Studies Center. He has taught labor studies on the community college level in both Oklahoma and Michigan and has taught history and education courses at the university level.

2014-2015

Gabriel Lattanzio

Gabriel Lattanzio, a doctoral candidate from the Université Paris Diderot, joined the Kalmanovitz Initiative as Visiting Scholar for the 2014-2015 academic year. At the KI, Lattanzio researched and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on American unionism and immigration from 1965 until 2000 with the support of a Fulbright grant. Gabriel has taught at the Université Paris Diderot, Sciences-Po Paris, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan. For two years, he was a research associate at the French National Center for Scientific Research under the direction of Christian Topalov, working on a sociological study of philanthropists and social reformers in New York at the turn of the 20th century. He holds a M.A. in American Civilization and a M.Sc. in Science Communication and has been involved in education reform and anti-war movements in his native France. Read more about Gabriel and his work.