Aidan J. Smith

My dissertation examines ongoing local struggles against poverty and other forms of economic injustice in the post-1960s rural American South. I have written previously about antipoverty activism in low-income black and white neighborhoods in late-1960s Durham, NC, and I am interested generally in the history of community organizing and the building of class-based movements in twentieth century America.

Outside of the History Department, I have served, in the past, as a Research Assistant for the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP), where I worked with the ongoing Long Civil Rights Movement (LCRM) project. I have also a long-standing interest in historical archives and the ways in which the work of historians and archivists intersect, and I have worked both as a Research Assistant and an Assistant Manuscripts Reference Librarian at the Southern Historical Collection in the Manuscripts Department of the UNC Library.