Claire Dunning

Claire Dunning holds a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. She teaches, researches, and writes about a variety of topics in social and political history of the twentieth century, including democratic governance, citizen participation, inequality, and social welfare provision in American cities. Her current book project, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: Poverty Policy and Privatization in Boston, 1949-present brings together histories of urban governance, grassroots movements, and capitalism to understand how changing methods of social welfare provision in the postwar period expanded the nonprofit sector and shaped urban neighborhoods. The project pairs a structural analysis of federal social policy with a local study of the city of Boston. Her work has been published by the Journal of Urban History, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the HistPhil blog. She holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College and previously worked in philanthropy at a community foundation.