Pamela W. Laird
Dr. Laird is professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. She holds a B.S. in psychology from Harvard University, a M.A. in history from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in history from Boston University.
Teaching: The history courses Dr. Laird teaches range from global technology to U.S. society and thought and business history. Her business-related courses include the history of U.S. business and the growth of the consumer culture worldwide. She has attended many workshops in teaching methodology and constantly works to develop innovative techniques to enhance her students’ learning, especially by encouraging their active participation in that learning.
Service: Dr. Laird began her involvement with University governance a dozen years ago as an advocate for non-tenure-track faculty. Although these members of the faculty are absolutely critical to the University’s operations, their ranks had been growing rapidly over the preceding decade without attracting appropriate appreciation or resources from fellow faculty or from administrators. Those service activities introduced her to faculty governance more generally. Currently she chairs the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Council, and is a member of the campus’s Faculty Assembly and the Colorado University’s Faculty Council. She is secretary of the UCD Budget Priorities Committee and sits on several other departmental, campus, and university committees. In 2003, she received her college’s service award, and in 2007 she received the CU Faculty Council’s Distinguished Service Award.
Dr. Laird belongs to six professional organizations and has implemented significant projects within two, the Society for the History of Technology and the Business History Conference. She has been elected to each of their governing boards and continues to serve in other ways; currently Dr. Laird is president of the Business History Conference. She also sits on the boards of five academic journals and on the board of a community group.
Research: Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) analyzes advertisements from 1870 to 1920 as products of developing business cultures. Those business cultures, in turn, manifested prevailing attitudes toward such charged notions as progress, technology, and gendered virtues. This book helps to explain the transition from a national ethos that gauged merit by thrift and productivity to one increasingly dominated by consumption priorities.
PULL: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Harvard University Press, 2006) contrasts how Americans have prospered—or not—with how we have talked about prospering. It offers insights into how business really operates and where its workings fit within American culture and values. For entrepreneurial achievement as well as success in the corporation, PULL shows the influences of networking and mentoring within business’s profoundly social processes, and how people on the margins of business taught us how to see them. It won the Hagley Prize in 2006.
Recent Recognitions and Honors: Advertising Progress received six book prize nominations, and the library magazine, Choice, selected it as an Outstanding Academic Book of 1999. For researching Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Laird received the American Association of University Women Research Leave Fellowship, 2001-2002, as well as a smaller research grant. PULL received the 2006 Hagley Prize for the best book in Business History.
In 2006, Dr. Laird received the Harold F. Williamson Prize, a biannual medallion awarded for mid-career achievement in business history, sponsored by the Business History Conference. She was the first recipient of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award in 2007. For her university service, she received the Annual Service Award of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2003, and in 2007 she received the University of Colorado’s Faculty Council Distinguished Service Award.
