Brooke Depenbusch is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at UIS. Her research examines US social policy and the way that its contours are shaped through legal, political, and social struggle.

Her current research project is a book manuscript, tentatively titled Warring on Welfare: Poverty, Politics, and Power in Twentieth Century. The book offers a fresh perspective on enduring questions in twentieth-century U.S. legal and political history: after years of seeming liberal consensus, what explains the late twentieth century conservative ascendance and what explains the unique weakness of the American safety net and its meanness toward the impoverished? By combining these questions and approaching them from an angle that has generally received little attention from scholars, the book offers a new perspective on this well tread terrain. The book narrates the political history of the welfare state from the vantage point of conflict over general relief, or the threadbare programs of public assistance that were controlled by state and local governments and which served as the safety net of, among other constituencies, the working poor. It shows that from the mid-1930s and onward across the twentieth century, conflicts over general relief, primarily at the state- and local-level but occasionally bursting forth on the national scene, were both constant and bitterly contested. It argues, moreover, that these fights over relief had the effect both of stymieing the expansion of the welfare state and serving as a crucial incubator of actors, institutions, and ideologies that, over time, ushered in the broader conservative ascendance of the late twentieth century.

The dissertation research on which her book is based was awarded with the University of Minnesota's Best Dissertation Award in the Arts & Humanities and she was a fellow of the American Society for Legal History's Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors. Her article, "The Long War on Welfare: Taxpayer Activists and the Politics of Backlash in Depression-Era America," appeared in the December 2025 issue of the Journal of American History.

Prior to beginning at UIS, she taught at Colgate University where, as visiting faculty, she was nominated for the Phi Eta Sigma Professor of the Year award. At UIS, her courses center on the relationship between law and various systems of inequality in the contemporary United States.