Lauren Hirshberg

Dr. Hirshberg's passion for History began as an undergraduate while studying 20th century U.S. social movements at UC Davis. During her Master’s degree training in Journalism at Northwestern University, she embarked on a global internship to New Zealand, where her research and writing interests expanded beyond the U.S. to the Pacific. Her deep interests in the Pacific eventually brought her to Ann Arbor to study with scholars of U.S. and Pacific history. In her Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan, Hirshberg delved into research on settler colonialism and U.S. Empire, Pacific history, urban and suburban history, and the Cold War. Her first book project, Suburban Empire: Cold War Militarization in the U.S. Pacific (University of California Press) explores local labor and segregation histories on a U.S. military base in the Marshall Islands amidst a global context of Cold War imperialism. Pieces from this larger book project have been published in LABOR journal, History and Technology, the OAH Magazine of History, and New York University Press edited volume Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism.

Hirshberg's teaching engages contexts of the U.S. Empire and the security state, social and cultural history, comparative histories of segregation in the U.S., Pacific history and cultural studies, mythologies of the West, politics and culture of the 1980s, the age of the Anthropocene, histories of war and wartime experiences (including the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and African American experiences of war during the 19th and 20th century).

Dr. Hirshberg serves as the Faculty Director for the Center for the Study of War Experience.