Premilla Nadasen

Born in South Africa and raised in the US, Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University and past president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color fought for economic justice. Her most recent book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023), examines profit extraction from the care economy as well as models of grassroots radical care that sit outside capitalism. She is also the author of two award-winning books, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. She is currently writing a biography of South African performer and international anti-apartheid icon Miriam Makeba. Nadasen has a long history of activism around economic justice, gender justice, apartheid, and labor rights. In 2023 she was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar for her activist and scholarly contributions.