Education
PhD, University of Colorado
Scholarship
Tom Krainz has published on social welfare, disability policy, disasters, and refugees in the Journal of Policy History, Disabilities Studies Quarterly, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, and the Pacific Historical Review. His articles have won the Ray Allen Billington Award, the Michael P. Malone Award, and the Ellis Hawley Prize. He is the author of Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West (2005) and A Great Many Refugees: Progressive Era Assistance in the American West (2025). His current book-length research examines the rise of work-relief programs (moving the unemployed from welfare to jobs) from the 1890s through the 1930s.
Dr. Krainz teaches classes on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 20th Century American West, Poverty and Welfare in the US, Westward Expansion, US Women's History, Refugees, Catholic Social Justice, and 19th and 20th Centuries US History.