Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, an associate professor of multicultural women’s and gender studies at Texas Woman’s University, is the recipient of a 2020 National Women’s Studies Association’s Sara A. Whaley Book Prize. The Sara A. Whaley Book Prize is awarded for groundbreaking scholarship in women’s studies that makes significant feminist contributions to the topic of women and labor. The prize honors Sara Whaley, who owned Rush Publishing and was the editor of Women’s Studies Abstracts.
Dr. Phillips-Cunningham’s book, Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers (Rutgers University Press, 2019), is a comparative racial history of Irish immigrant and southern Black women who labored as domestic workers in northeastern U.S. cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of archival sources from the United States and Ireland, this intersectional study explores how these women were significant to the racial labor and citizenship politics of their time.
Dr. Phillips-Cunningham is a graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta. She holds a Ph.D. in women’s and gender studies from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.