Victoria Hattam

Who is Victoria Hattam?

Victoria Hattam is an Australian-born American political scientist, noted for her research on American political economy and political development, and on the role of class, race and ethnicity in American politics.

Hattam graduated from the University of Melbourne in Australia in 1976 with a B.A. degree in political science and philosophy. She completed her M.A. at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and her PhD in political science at MIT in 1987. Her doctoral dissertation on "Unions and Politics: The Courts and American Labor, 1806-1896" was awarded the E.E. Schattschneider prize by the American Political Science Association in 1989 for the best dissertation on American government and politics. Hattam's revised dissertation was published as her first book, Labor Visions and State Power and examines why labor has played a more limited role in national politics in the United States than in other advanced industrial societies.

Hattam taught at Yale University from 1987 to 1993, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation from 1997 to 1999 and a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for 2000-2001. She joined the political science faculty at New School University in New York in 1993 and is presently an professor and chair of the department.