Alice O'Connor

Alice O’Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Director of the UCSB Washington Center program in Washington, DC. She teaches and writes about poverty and wealth, social and urban policy, and inequality in the United States. Among her publications are Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (2001); Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (2007), and the co-edited volumes Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities (with Chris Tilly and Lawrence Bobo), and Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States: An Encyclopedia (with Gwendolyn Mink). Before joining the UCSB faculty, she was a program officer at the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Her current research focuses on the changing politics and cultural meaning of wealth in the post World War II United States, and the origins of the second Gilded Age.