Rate My Professor Alice O'Connor

Alice O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of the UCSB Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy. She received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1991. A historian of inequality and public policy in the twentieth and early twenty-first century United States, her academic interests encompass the dynamics of wealth and poverty, social and urban policy, the politics of knowledge, the history of organized philanthropy, and the political economy of housing. O'Connor teaches core and elective courses supporting the History of Public Policy and Law major and the interdisciplinary Minor in Poverty, Inequality, and Social Justice, which receives administrative support from the Blum Center.

Her scholarly contributions include several key books: Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2001), recognized as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001; Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, co-edited with Gary Gerstle and Nelson Lichtenstein (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities, co-edited with Chris Tilly and Lawrence Bobo (Russell Sage Foundation, 2001); and Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Policy, and Politics, co-edited with Gwendolyn Mink (ABC-Clio, 2004). Selected articles and chapters feature 'The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York' (Journal of Urban History, 2008), 'Financing the Counterrevolution' in Rightward Bound (Harvard University Press, 2008), and 'Poverty and Paradox' (The Hedgehog Review, 2014). O'Connor held a fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation from 1995 to 1996 and serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She previously directed graduate studies in UCSB's History Department and the university's Washington Center Program. Her work has significantly influenced understandings of social policy, philanthropy, and economic inequality in American history.