Rate My Professor Lara Vapnek

Professor Lara Vapnek is a faculty member in the Department of History at St. John's University, where she has served as Professor since 2017, following appointments as Associate Professor from 2011 to 2017 and Assistant Professor from 2006 to 2011. She previously held lecturer and adjunct positions at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and Barnard College. Vapnek earned her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2000, along with an M.Phil. in 1994 and an M.A. in 1992 from the same institution, and a B.A. magna cum laude with Honors in History from Barnard College in 1990.

She specializes in the history of gender, labor, and political activism in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Her current book project, Mothers, Milk and Money: A History of Infant Feeding in the United States, is under contract with Oxford University Press and was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; a related article appeared in the Journal of American History. Previous publications include the books Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (University of Illinois Press, 2009) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary (Routledge, 2015), as well as articles in Feminist Studies and the Journal of Women's History. Vapnek serves as a Contributing Editor to Labor: Studies in Working-Class History and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She has contributed to public programming at institutions including the Tenement Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Women's History at the New-York Historical Society. She also serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History.