Jennifer Mittelstadt

Jennifer Mittelstadt is a historian of the twentieth-century United States with broad interests in the state, political economy, women and gender, social and political movements, the military, and foreign affairs. She is an author or editor of four books, including From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945-1964 (University of North Carolina, 2005) and The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). Her work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, among others, and she served as the Harold K. Johnson Chair in Military History at the US Army War College. She is a series editor of Power, Politics, and the World at Penn Press, and is currently writing a book about grassroots right-wing participation in US foreign policy. Additionally, she teaches as part of the law and history program in the Department of History at New Brunswick. She has consulted on legal cases for veterans and wrote the amicus brief for the federal appeals court for a case on transgender service in the military.

Publications:

• "Why Does Trump Threaten America's Allies?" New York Times, Feb 2, 2025
• The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
• “Historians and the Law Roundtable,” Modern American History, (forthcoming 2026).

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• “Sovereignty and Anti-Internationalism in US History,” Problem Solving Workshop on the Crisis in International Law, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Law and Policy Program, April 28, 2025, Washington DC.
• “A World of Sovereigntist Nations,” Liberalism for the 21st Century, Second Annual Conference of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, Washington, DC, August 15, 2025.
• “Rethinking Fringes and Mainstreams: Insights into the History of the American Right from The Divided America Project Archive,” Brown University, January 24, 2025.

Accomplishments:

• Guggenheim Fellow
• Fellow, Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library

Upcoming projects:

• Sovereignty and Subversion: The Grassroots Right and the Fight against Internationalism, 1919-2000 (monograph).
• Consultant, Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Reinterpretation of Previously Closed Sites Related to Social Welfare in the Military

All my work revolves around the relationships between the state and society, particularly how questions of citizenships, rights, duties, and entitlements were historically created. I ask how the social identities of individuals in the past shape their interactions with the state and vice versa. My works center, in particular, how gendered and racialized concepts of citizenship, rights and power influence political and legal structures, from civilian welfare states to the military to foreign policy.