Mattie Armstrong-Price

Assistant Professor of History 
Email: [email protected]
Office: Dealy 639
Phone:  718-817-1114

  • PhD Rhetoric, 2015
    University of California, Berkeley

    MA School of Divinity, 2008
    Subfield: History of Religions
    University of Chicago

    BA Religion and Interpretation Theory, 2005  
    Swarthmore College

  • I study histories of labor, gender, and technology in modern imperial Britain.  My first book, entitled Respectability on the Line, will be published by the University of California Press in February 2026. 
     
    Respectability on the Line offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. Using company records, I show how executives shaped the domestic and working lives of higher-grade employees with an eye to cultivating their respectability. Meanwhile workers' writings reveal how railway towns provided opportunities for some employees to maintain non-heteronormative living arrangements. The book tracks these histories of everyday life while also outlining stories of early trade unionism. In Britain, railway unionists established benefit funds that mimicked company-sponsored provident funds, while in colonial India workers fought to gain access to company benefits on equal terms. This comparative study shows how industrial labor was made through conflict, subversion, and accommodation across an uneven imperial field.
     
    I am interested in advising graduate students who intend to study global labor history, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of modern imperial Britain. 

  • Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (University of California Press, 2026). 

    "Risk Management," in University Keywords, ed. Andy Hines (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025). 

    With Julie Beth Napolin, “Adjacent Histories: Reading Riley’s Am I That Name? Against Contemporary Debates in Feminism,” in History of the Present 11:2 (October 2021). 

    The Wooden Brain: Organizing Untimeliness Marx’s Capital,” in Mediations 30:3 (Fall 2017).

    “Looting: A Colonial Genealogy of the Contemporary Idea,” in Postmodern Culture 27:1 (September 2016).

  • Mattie Armstrong-Price's CV