Julia Smith

• LABR 1260 - Working for a Living
• LABR 1290 - Introduction to the Canadian Labour Movement
• LABR 2110 - Labour and Popular Culture
• LABR 2300 - Workers, Employers and the State
• LABR 3230 - Human Rights at Work

I am an assistant professor in the Labour Studies Program at the University of Manitoba on Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation. My research and teaching focus on the history and politics of work, unions, labour relations, and feminist activism in Canada. I am also a member of the Graphic History Collective and the co-author/co-editor of several graphic history books.

• PhD (Canadian Studies), Trent University
• MA (History), Simon Fraser University
• BA Honours (History and Labour Studies), Simon Fraser University

Research interests

• Gender and work
• Labour relations
• Worker organizing
• Canadian political economy
• Labour and working-class history
• Gender and women's history

Research summary

I study the history and politics of work, unions, labour relations, and feminist activism in Canada.

Peer-reviewed articles

• "From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women's Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries," with Joan Sangster, Women: A Cultural Review 30, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 141-161.
• "The First Canadian Bank Strike: Labour Relations and White-Collar Union Organizing during the Second World War," Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 623-646.
• "The Labour Relations of Love: Workers, Child care, and the State in 1970s Vancouver, British Columbia," with Lisa Pasolli, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 14, no. 4 (December 2017): 39-60.
• "Thigh in the Sky': Canadian Pacific Dresses Its Female Flight Attendants," with Joan Sangster, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 14, no. 1 (March 2017): 39-63.
• "Beards and Bloomers: Flight Attendants, Grievances and Embodied Labour in the Canadian Airline Industry, 1960s-1980s," with Joan Sangster, Gender, Work and Organization 23, no. 2 (March 2016): 183-199.
• "An 'Entirely Different' Kind of Union: The Service, Office, and Retail Workers' Union of Canada (SORWUC), 1972-1986," Labour/Le Travail 73 (Spring 2014): 23-65.

Edited book

• Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, History, and Marxism, eds. Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith (Edmonton, AB: AU Press, 2021).

Book chapters

• “Discipline as Deterrence: Labour Relations and the Silencing of Feminist Labour Activists,” with Joan Sangster. In Essays in the History of Canadian Law Volume XII: New Perspectives on Gender and the Law, edited by Lori Chambers and Joan Sangster, 244–274. Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the University of Toronto Press, 2023.
• "Old Positions/New Directions: Strategies for Rebuilding Canadian Working-Class History," with Sean Carleton, in Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, History, and Marxism, eds. Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith (Edmonton, AB: AU Press, 2021), 279-297.
• "Challenging Work: Feminist Scholarship on Women, Gender, and Work in Canadian History," with Lisa Pasolli, in Reading Canadian Women's and Gender History, eds. Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 278-297.