John Commerford Labor Education Awards

Leon Fink is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the History Department at University of Illinois Chicago. A specialist in American labor, immigration history, postwar politics, and the Gilded Age/Progressive Era, he was the founder and director of the PhD concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World. Dr. Fink also edited Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, the official journal of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), through the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.

Professor Fink is the author or principal editor of a dozen books and is recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including service as a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Senior Scholar, NEH Fellow, and recipient of the Sol Stetin Award of the Sidney Hillman Foundation. He has also taken a leading role in national history education circles, where he has stressed the necessary collaboration between the university and the public schools.

Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. He teaches courses on 19th century U.S. history and has taught courses on American literature and 20th-century American culture and politics. His The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Professor Wilentz has received numerous fellowships from, among other institutions, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin. Formerly a contributing editor to The New Republic, and currently a member of the editorial boards of Dissent and Democracy, he lectures frequently and has contributed some four hundred articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces to publications such as the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The American Scholar, The Nation, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. His writings on American music, including his book Bob Dylan in America, have earned him two Grammy nominations and two Deems Taylor-ASCAP awards.

In addition, the 2026 Bernard Bellush Prize for graduate research will be awarded to Liana Katz, a PhD candidate in the Geography Department at Rutgers University, for her essay “Warehouse in the Garden: Land, Labor, and the Human in New Jersey’s Warehouse Sector.” Drawing on theories of racial capitalism and critical science and technology studies, she engages with warehouse workers and communities located near warehouses to understand how logistics development is impacting land use and labor around the state. Liana has a master’s degree in urban planning from UCLA and is a former Douglass College mentor and labor organizer with the Rutgers grad student and faculty union.