Faculty & Staff Directory : Labor Center : UMass Amherst

Full-time Faculty & Staff

Carolina Bank Muñoz

Professor

Carolina Bank Muñoz’s work focuses on immigration, labor, work, and Latin America

Cedric de Leon

Professor

Professor de Leon specializes in labor and party politics, both in America and abroad

Sierra Dickey

Academic Program Manager & Events Coordinator

As the Academic Program & Events Manager Sierra schedules courses, supports faculty and students, and organizes events

Clare Hammonds

Professor of Practice

Professor Hammonds specializes in gender-related work issues, and labor organizing in the U.S.

Tom Juravich

Professor

Professor Juravich specializes in work and labor, especially from an ethnographic perspective

Jasmine Kerrissey

Labor Center Director and Professor of Sociology

Professor Kerrissey specializes in the American labor movement, work, politics, and inequality.

Nellie Taylor

Associate Director For Academic Programs

Labor Center recruitment, outreach, social media, and general operations.

Eve Weinbaum

Associate Professor

Professor Weinbaum specializes in organizing, labor and politics, and gender-related pay disparities

Affiliated Faculty

Dave Kamper

Labor History

Dave Kamper has taught Labor History at the Labor Center since 2021. He has a PhD in History from the University of Illinois. He has a long career in organized labor and is currently a Policy Strategist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Harris Freeman

Labor & Employment Law

Harris Freeman has taught labor and employment law at the UMass Amherst Labor Center since 1999. He is Professor Emeritus at Western New England University School of Law where he taught classes in labor and employment law for more than 25 years. He is also a research associate and adjunct professor in the Government Department at Smith College. Freeman received his J.D. from Western New England University and his B.A. from the University of Florida.

Alejandro Reuss

Labor and the U.S. Economy

Alejandro Reuss is a historian and economist. He holds degrees from Tufts University (MA, History) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (PhD, Economics). His interests in the social sciences include political economy, labor economics and labor history, power structure research, economic history (U.S. and world), development economics, environmental economics, and game theory. He teaches "Labor and the U.S. Economy" in the Union Leadership and Activism (ULA) program at UMass Amherst, and teaches undergraduate courses on U.S. labor history, labor and migration, unions and collective bargaining, and race, class, and gender at UMass Boston. His published writings include the book Labor and the Global Economy (2013) and essay "The Power of Capital" (2020). He is a past co-editor and editorial board member at Dollars & Sense magazine.

Erica Smiley

Labor at the Intersections: Race, Gender, Immigration

Erica Smiley is the Executive Director of Jobs With Justice. A long-time organizer and movement leader, Smiley has been spearheading strategic organizing and policy interventions for Jobs With Justice for over 20 years. Prior to taking up her current position with the organization, Smiley served as organizing director for Jobs With Justice developing campaigns that resulted in transformative changes to how working people organize and are civically engaged at their workplaces and in their communities. During her tenure at Jobs With Justice, Smiley has served in numerous leadership capacities including as organizing director and as senior field organizer for the southern region.

Barbara Madeloni

Building Democratic Unions

Barbara Madeloni is a labor organizer and writer with Labor Notes. Her course Building a Democratic Union grows from her experience with union caucuses and reform leaders across the country, as well as her experience as the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (2014-2018).

Pat Greenfield

Labor & Employment Law

Pat Greenfield, Director of the Labor Center from 1990-1997, was part of the team that established the ULA program. She has taught the ULA Labor Law course for a number of years, most recently in partnership with Harris Freeman. In addition to almost four decades of work in labor education, she has been a member of several different public and private sector unions, serving as a steward, executive board member, local union president, and on international union staff. She has a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Rochester, a J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Jerry Levinsky

Sports, Labor, and Social Justice

Jerry currently teaches Labor 203-Sports, Labor and Social Justice, as well as Labor 390-Service Learning: Labor and Community Organizing. Jerry has served as part-time faculty at the University of Massachusetts since 1993, where for many years he taught in the Legal Studies program, where he coordinated the Civil Rights Clinical Project, which was recognized both at the university and nationally as a model of undergraduate service-learning education. Jerry also serves as a member of the Executive Boards of both the Mass Society of Professors (MTA/NEA), and the Western Mass Area Labor Federation (AFL-CIO), where he also serves as Chair of the Education Committee.

Courtney Derwinski

Collective Bargaining

Courtney Derwinski has worked in the labor movement for nearly three decades. She currently works for the Massachusetts Teachers Association managing the Bargaining Campaign Strategy Team and the Metro Boston field office. Her work centers participatory, member-driven bargaining strategies that build power through large teams, transparent processes, and contract campaigns grounded in power analyses and escalating collective actions.

Courtney is also an experienced educator. She has served as adjunct faculty at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School for Workers, where her teaching areas focused on the economics of bargaining, pensions and health care systems, and strategic campaigns. Her pedagogy is rooted in popular education practices that respect the lived experience of students, creating learning spaces where students build shared analyses and their capacity to put lessons into practice beyond the classroom.

Labor Center Fellows

Nate Meyers

Fellow

Nate is an economic and organizational sociologist specializing in earnings dynamics, labor, economic transformations, and the public sector. His work identifies how the restructuring of the American economy over the past half-century has reshaped labor market outcomes and the functioning of government in the U.S. His research integrates quantitative methods and historical data analysis to explore the role of business actors in driving economic change in relation to labor and the state.

Sara Gia Trongone

Postdoctoral Fellow 2025 - 2026

Sara received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an Advanced Organizer and Trainer for EWOC, past co-President of AFT Local 3220, and a founding member of the University Labor Council. She loves talking shop about how to build a multiracial and intersectional working-class movement.