Rate My Professor Emma Amador

Emma Amador is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, a position she has held since fall 2017. She specializes in the history of Puerto Ricans, Latinas in the United States, and women and gender, with research and teaching experience in Puerto Rican, United States, Caribbean, and Latin American history. Amador earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 2015, with a dissertation titled “Welfare is Work: Social Welfare, Migration, and Women’s Activism in Puerto Rican Communities after 1917,” and examination fields in Latino/as in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, twentieth-century United States history, and comparative ethnic studies. She holds an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Connecticut in 2006, with a concentration in Latino/a Studies, and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004. Prior to her current role, she served as Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and History Department from 2016 to 2017, and Assistant Professor of History at Goucher College from 2015 to 2017.

Amador’s scholarship focuses on Puerto Rican women’s involvement in political activism for social and economic justice in Puerto Rico and the United States throughout the twentieth century, encompassing social welfare, social policy, labor studies, social movements, and feminisms. She is the author of The Politics of Care Work: Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice (Duke University Press, 2025). Key publications include “Caring for Labor History” in LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (2020), “Linked Histories of Welfare, Labor, and Puerto Rican Migration” in Modern American History (2019), “‘Women Ask Relief for Puerto Ricans:’ Social Workers, the Social Security Act and Puerto Rican Communities, 1933-1943” in LABOR (2016), and “Organizing Puerto Rican Domestics: Resistance and Household Labor Reform in the Puerto Rican Diaspora after 1930” in International Labor and Working-Class History (2015). Her awards include the Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University, Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Rackham Merit Fellowship from the University of Michigan, JEDI Initiative Research Award, CLAS Research in Academic Themes Award, SCHARP Award, Humanities Faculty Fellowship (2019-2020), Felberbaum Family Faculty Award, and Humanities Book Support Award from the University of Connecticut. She teaches courses such as History of Latina/os in the United States, Latina/os and Human Rights, Latina History, Gender, and Biography, and Gender and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean.