Barbara Y. Welke

Barbara Y. Welke is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, a professor of history, and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, where she codirects the program in law and history. She is the author of Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth-Century United States (2010), which considers the history of legal personhood and citizenship, and Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (2001), winner of the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize. Her current research on consumer product injury in the twentieth-century mass consumption economy has appeared in an article, "The Cowboy Suit Tragedy: Spreading Risk, Owning Hazard in the Modern American Economy," in the Journal of American History (June 2014) and a related podcast, as well as a play, "Owning Hazard, A Tragedy," in the UC Irvine Law Review (2011). She is also working on a book that traces the history of the curriculum vitae and its role in constructing the boundaries of knowledge.