Natalie Fousekis, Ph.D.

Biography

Natalie Fousekis is Director of the Lawrence B. de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History (COPH) and Professor of History. She specializes in modern U.S. History, grassroots politics, women’s history, and oral history. Fousekis has been engaged in oral history work for almost twenty-five years — conducting dozens of interviews, teaching oral history methodology to undergraduate students, graduate students, and community members. She has coordinated and directed a number of oral history projects, including the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station Oral History Project in collaboration with the Orange County Great Park Corporation, as well as the Women, Politics, and Activism Since Suffrage Project (WPA) funded by a major research grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. In 2011 she also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant for COPH’s Renovation and Expansion Initiative. Currently, Fousekis serves as Vice President of the Oral History Association and is its incoming President. Her book Demanding Child Care: Women’s Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971 (2011) uses oral histories among other sources to examine a grassroots movement waged by mothers and educators to preserve California’s public child care program from World War II to the War on Poverty.