Cecelia Bucki

Cecelia Bucki, Ph.D., has been Professor of History at Fairfield University for the past twenty-five years, after previously teaching at Hamilton College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University. Her specialties within US History are social, labor and working-class, and immigration and ethnic history. Her main research interest is the nexus of US 20th century labor and urban politics, as demonstrated in her first book, the award-winning Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915-1936 (University of Illinois Press, 2001).
Since the 1980s, she has created various public history projects in Connecticut, and participated in social studies teacher-training. She has worked deeply in the nineteenth-century urban and industrial history of Connecticut, including a study and museum script for the Mattatuck Museum on the industrialization of Waterbury. Her particular focus for the Little Liberia site is the 1880s-era transition of Bridgeport’s South End to industrial production and the arrival of European immigrants to the neighborhood.

Her broader experience in local history has been as editor-in-chief of the journal Connecticut History Review from 2011-2017. She is active in a variety of local, state, and national history organizations; she has served as officer or board member in the Association for the Study of Connecticut Coordinating Committee for History, the Organization of American Historians, and the Labor and Working-Class History Association.