Nina Fishman

Who is Nina Fishman?

Nina Fishman was an American-born English labour movement historian and political activist.

Fishman was born in San Francisco. Her father, Leslie Fishman, was an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. However, he was also a member of the Communist Party of the United States and was forced out of the university in the late 1940s, moving to Idaho State College and then the University of Colorado at Boulder. Fishman attended junior high school and high school in Boulder, although she lived in Britain for a year in 1962 while her father held a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge.

Fishman returned to Britain to read economics at the University of Sussex, then known for student radicalism. Her family moved permanently to Britain in 1967 when her father was appointed to a teaching post at the University of Warwick, later securing a chair at the University of Keele. She graduated in 1968 with a third, having spent most of her last year on the picket lines supporting striking building workers at the Barbican Centre in London. However, she then began a part-time history degree at Birkbeck College, London.