About

Stephanie Fortado is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations. She holds a PhD in US History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an MA in History from Indiana University, Indianapolis, and a BA in Communications from Taylor University. Her research interests focus on social and cultural history of the modern United States, particularly African American working class and social movement history. She is especially interested in Civil Rights and Black Power history, as well as labor history related to women’s history, environmental history, and urban history. Fortado was awarded a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in support of her research and participated in the 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on regional humanities ecosystems. She is working on her first book, tentatively titled 'Race, Recreation and Rebellion: The Black Freedom Movement and Urban Parks in Cleveland, Ohio 1945-1977.' She teaches courses on US Labor History, Gender, Race, Class and Work, and other topics related to labor and social movements. Additionally, she is a member of her union NTFC 6546, affiliated with the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Ancient history
• Art
• Management
• History
• Literature
• Classics

Selected publications

• Preface

  Berghahn Books · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy

  Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class in the summer of 2020, it may not be the most important question. The people in the streets-Black, Brown, white-are raising fists and holding masks in place, not brandishing copies of books, whether larger or small. Some are turning, or returning, to James Baldwin. Others reach for Frantz Fanon. His recurrent arguments about the ways that colonial occupation made it "impossible to breathe" are an uncanny reminder of the way it has always been for people oppressed because of the color of their skin. 1 Or, we read poetry-which, to recast Irish poet Eavan Boland, is "at once an archive of defeat and a diagram of victory." 2 In its comparatively small frame the poem holds the world, and seems well-suited to our TLDR/too long didn't read world. It's the perfect primer, readable off a small screen and committed easily to memory. Who has the time or patience to read big books now?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Histories of a Radical Book: A roundtable conversation on empire, colonialism, and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class

  Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History · 2021

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Histories of a Radical BookA roundtable conversation on empire, colonialism, and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Fortado, Clare Anderson, Caroline Bressey, Ann Curthoys, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Utathya Chattopadhyaya CA: Antoinette, Stephanie: Histories of a Radical Book is an absolutely fascinating volume. Most historians have engaged with E.P. Thompson's work in one way or another, and yet beyond a general nod to "history from below" before now those of us working on empire and colonialism have not systematically engaged with it. So, I want to ask you: what does his The Making of the English Working Class have to do with empire? AB: Thanks for this question, Clare, which is obviously key for readers of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. At the most basic level, empire is and has been constitutive of all aspects of modern British social, economic, political and cultural life (at the very least), so it's important to think with Thompson's book in that context. It's meaningful that he doesn't engage with any imperial contexts in the book, even though the industrial revolution itself was entangled in systems of slavery and emancipation and as well as imperial power. Of course, scholars who followed after The Making took up many of its silences, including Ron Ramdin, who wrote The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain as a dialectic response. The fact that Thompson can apparently "not see" empire in his book reminds us of how comparatively recent calls for and practices of decolonizing British history are. And as our new preface suggests, the links between whiteness, working-class identities and Black history across the globe have been consequential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories, in ways that make it all the more critical to be reminded of how and under what conditions empire and its legacies shape these struggles, even as the long reach of imperial power and material impact is often subordinated (especially in contemporary narratives of the history of White supremacy). The time is ripe for a larger revisiting of these questions. CB: As Antoinette says, the time is certainly ripe for a revisiting of these questions, but how such questions will even be framed in Britain seems to be painfully fraught. I am writing this as a so-called "culture war" becomes a seemingly established way of framing how histories of the empire and its legacies should be researched, discussed and made public in Britain. The toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in the summer of 2020 seemed to signal the start of a reckoning for Britain with its colonial past, but the debate that has been unleashed feels that it could become something akin to Australia's "History Wars" that Ann speaks to below. The controversy in response to the toppling of Colston was an indication of how painful any open conversation would be. For some, the downing of the statue seemed to come as wholly unexpected, an event that emerged suddenly and disrupted public discourses on public and narrative history and reshaped the urban landscape of Bristol and its public realm in unforeseen and deeply uncomfortable ways. It was for them, apparently, the start of something, of a rocking of the status quo, of retaliation, something that could be talked through and down with a conversation. For others, particularly audiences in Bristol, it was simply the most recent moment in a long history over the battle for what kinds of histories were remembered and memorialised in the city's urban landscape. The downing of Colston prompted renewed attention on attempts to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking the High Street in Oxford and one of the ways the BLM protests were made local in the city was through renewed calls for the fall of Rhodes. On 10 June 2020, two days after Colston's downing, crowds in Oxford chanted "take it down" beneath Rhodes' statue. They were resurrecting a 2015 campaign when a group of students, inspired by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign launched in South Africa that year, had sought to have the statue removed as...

  PublisherDOI

• Preface

  Berghahn Books · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Antoinette Burton

  3 shared

• Caroline Bressey

  1 shared

• Utathya Chattopadhyaya

  1 shared

• Clare Anderson

  1 shared

• Isabel Hofmeyr

  Stockholm University

  1 shared

• Ann Curthoys

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• Selected to participate in the 2023 National Endowment for t…