Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Georga-Kay Whyte is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History, where she studies 20th-century U.S. history with a particular interest in education, care work, race, and class. Her dissertation, “The University Works Because We Do: A Social and Intellectual History of Custodial Labor at U.S. Universities c.1870–1970,” interrogates the labor history of universities in the U.S. and focuses on custodial laborers. In her project, she traces worker protest movements across various campuses from the post-emancipation period to the Civil Rights Movement, where these struggles intensified. She holds an M.A. in History from Brown University and a B.A. in History from Agnes Scott College. She has shared her work at the Organization of American Historians, the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Southern Association for Women Historians. As a first-generation scholar, she is committed to public scholarship and translating her academic research for cross-disciplinary audiences.