Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University received a Fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her new project is a history of American democracy in the decades after the 1965 Voting Rights Act that centers on people who did not or could not vote. It focuses on the politics of abstention, immigration, felon disenfranchisement, and voter fraud.
Kohler-Hausmann's first book, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America, chronicles efforts during the 1970s to enact "tough" welfare, drug, and anti-crime laws. It examines how the unprecedented growth of the penal system and the retrenchment of the nation’s welfare programs developed hand in hand, animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during the period.
