Rate My Professor Gunther Peck

Peck's research centers on the long history of human trafficking and its intersections with the evolution of racial ideology, humanitarian intervention, immigration policy, and whiteness in North America and Europe. His scholarship examines how narratives of white victimhood and white slavery have shaped racist ideologies and political discourse. Key publications include the book Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (2000), which has garnered over 330 citations, and Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood (2024), published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press. This work traces the historical fantasies of white slavery from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revealing how laboring individuals leveraged whiteness for economic and political advantage. Other notable works are "Labor abolition and the politics of white victimhood: Rethinking the history of working-class racism" (Journal of the Early Republic, 2019), "The shadow of white slavery: Race, innocence, and history in contemporary anti-human trafficking campaigns" (2016), and "Counting Modern Slaves: Historicizing the Emancipatory Work of Numbers" (2021). Peck's publications have been cited over 665 times according to Google Scholar. He mentors graduate students in History and Public Policy and teaches undergraduate courses such as “Immigrant Dreams, American Realities: U.S. Immigration Policy History,” “Historicizing Whiteness,” “Human Trafficking, Past to Present,” and “North American Environmental History.”