Samir Sonti is a historian of U.S. labor and political economy. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of New Labor Forum. Prior to arriving at SLU, Dr. Sonti held various roles in the labor movement. His current book project, Inflation: A Political History, examines the contested politics of inflation in the twentieth-century United States. Most recently, he is co-editor (with Nelson Lichtenstein) of Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today (The New Press, 2025).

 

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Degrees

  • B.A. University of Pennsylvania, 2009 (Political Science)
  • B.S. University of Pennsylvania, 2009 (Economics)
  • Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2017 (History)

Research

  • Effects of financialization on working conditions
  • Labor and employment policy
  • Historical political economy

Publications

  • “‘The Credit Problem Is Our Biggest Labor Problem’: Labor and the Making of Monetary Policy,” in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer ed., Work, Capitalism, and Democracy: The United States since the New Deal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).
  • Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today (New York: The New Press, 2025).
  • “‘One Dedicated, Single-Minded Staff Aide’: John M. Blair and Institutional Keynesianism in Postwar U.S. Economic Policy,” Journal of Policy History 37, no. 2 (2025): 90-113.
  • “Sorting Out the Politics of Inflation, Past and Present,” in Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, The Pandemic and the Working-Class: How U.S. Labor Navigated COVID-19 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2025).
  • “The Strange Career of Institutional Keynesianism,” in Romain Huret, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel eds., Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and its Legacies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
  • “Conflict and Consensus: The Steel Strike of 1959 and the Anatomy of the New Deal Order,” Critical Historical Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 39-73 (co-authored with Kristoffer Smemo and Gabriel Winant)

Course Taught

  • LABR 601: U.S. Labor History
  • LABR 607: Labor and the Economy
  • PADM 611: U.S. Social and Economic Policy
  • LBR 201: Introduction to Labor Studies
  • URB 301: Introduction to U.S. Social and Economic Policy

Areas of Experience

  • Social and economic policy
  • Financialization
  • Inequality
  • Twentieth-century United States
  • Labor and working-class history

Grants and Awards

  • PSC Research Award
  • Washington Center for Equitable Growth Grant for Junior Scholars
  • Dirksen Congressional Research Grant
  • University of California Group in Economic History Research Fellowship

Boards and Organizations

  • Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute Working Group on Policy in the Public Good
  • Labor and Working-Class History Association
  • United Association of Labor Educators
  • Professional Staff Congress-CUNY