Working-Class History Seminar Series

The Alice and Staughton Lynd Working Class History Seminar invites faculty, staff, students, and community members to attend a discussion with Robin J. Sowards on the past, present, and future of academic unions. As a lead organizer for the Union for Pitt Faculty campaign as well as other academic unionization efforts, Sowards brings first-hand experience alongside history, theory, and strategy to a discussion of industrial unionism within labor organizing in higher education.

Robin J. Sowards (Ph.D. Cornell, 2006) is a union organizer, researcher, and negotiator at the United Steelworkers, primarily assigned to the higher education sector. Before taking a role as a union staffer, he was on the volunteer organizing committee at Duquesne University and went on to work on successful organizing campaigns at Point Park University and Robert Morris University then as lead organizer of the faculty campaign at the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches linguistics as an adjunct lecturer at Chatham University in Pittsburgh.