Anne Gessler is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Humanities Program and the First-Year Seminar Program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She has published in Utopian Studies, American Studies in Scandinavia, Radio Journal, and Journal of Southern History.
Additionally, Gessler has conducted extensive oral history interviews with cooperative activists in New Orleans and Austin. Check back frequently to listen to selected interviewees’ stories.
Gessler’s book, Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), is a cultural history of the cooperatives driving New Orleans’s urban development. Drawing on archives and interviews with grassroots activists from the 1890s to today, it contends that sustained socializing among laborers, women, immigrants, and people of color propelled a neighborhood-focused, globally inspired cooperative movement that has democratized New Orleans’s economic and political institutions.
Engaging with women’s and gender studies, social movement history, consumer activism, and media studies, Gessler’s next book project will examine women’s innovative use of amateur radio to claim technical and civic authority in Cold War-era America.
Anne Gessler 