Sarah Milov

About Fellow

Sarah Milov is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She writes about modern US political, legal, and labor history—especially how people use their time at work to change law and culture. She explored these themes in her first book, The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard, 2019), which received the PROSE Award for North American History and the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Society for Southern Women Historians, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her second book, Karen Silkwood: A Half-Life and Afterlives (coauthored with Katherine Turk), a political biography of the nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood, will be published with One Signal (Simon & Schuster). Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Jacobin, and The Atlantic, among others.

Her current project, Damned Women: Sex and Sterilization at an American Factory, tells the story of the “occupational sterilizations” undertaken by women at a West Virginia chemical factory in 1978 as a condition of keeping their jobs.

Selected Publications

• Milov, Sarah. “Damned Women: Fetal Protection as Employer Offensive at American Cyanamid.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 22, no. 4 (2025): 101–28.
• Milov, Sarah. “Gags and Grievance: The Labor Origins of Whistleblowing.” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, 2024.
• Milov, Sarah. The Cigarette: A Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
• Milov, Sarah, and Reuel Schiller. “Creating ‘Initiatory Democracy’: Ralph Nader, the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, and the Shaping of Liberalism in the 1970s.” In Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals Since the 1970s, edited by Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.