History Graduate Students

Profile: 

Maribel Morey is writing a dissertation on a landmark study that the U.S. Supreme Court, the Truman Administration, Congress, and the public-at-large in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s cited when discussing the urgency for white-black integration in the United States: Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

In the dissertation, she asks why the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an elite philanthropic organization whose prior funding for black Americans largely went towards developing segregated vocational education for this group of Americans) commissioned, funded, and published this two-volume manifesto in favor of racial integration. 

Because An American Dilemma (1944) was significant in postwar Americans’ discussions of racial equality, this dissertation contributes to the existing historiography of the U.S. civil rights movement in two significant ways. First, it helps us understand why this important American institution stood beside civil rights actors, American lawyers, grassroots activists, and politicians as a key player in promoting racial integration in the postwar United States. Second, it helps us place postwar Americans' federally-enforced racial integration within a broader global history of applied social sciences, philanthropic giving, and public policymaking in 1920s and 1930s United States, British Africa, and Sweden.   

This past academic year, Maribel Morey was a guest researcher at Stockholm University's Sociology Department under Fulbright and American-Scandinavian Foundation grants. This year, she is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at NYU School of Law. 

Princeton University, PhD (History), expected 2012-13; Princeton University, MA (History), 2008; New York University School of Law, JD, 2006; University of Notre Dame, BA (Politics and Romance Languages & Literatures), 2003.