Marian Mollin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Department of History
433 Major Williams Hall
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0117

e-mail: mmollin@vt.edu
phone: 540-231-8367
fax: 540-231-8724

Bread and Puppet museum
Historic puppets from the Bread and Puppet Museum in Glover, Vermont

Research Interests and Professional Activities

20th-Century U.S. Social and Political History
Women and Gender in U.S. History
History of Social Movements
Oral History

Professor Mollin's research explores the connections between gender, protest, activism, and culture, with a focus on the history of American social movements. Her recent book, Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), examines the complex nature of men's and women's political protest within the radical wing of the American peace movement from 1940 through 1970. Using a combination of archival sources and oral histories, this work emphasizes the contradictory ways in which gender and race shaped the work of activist women and men. She has published related articles in Oral History Review and Radical History Review and has contributed to a variety of digital history projects, including the NEH-funded Digital History Reader.

Dr. Mollin's current book project is a biography of Sister Ita Ford, one of the four American churchwomen murdered by the El Salvadoran military in December 1980. This project explores the historical questions raised by Ford's life and death, placing Ford squarely within the context of postwar American women's history, the history of the 1960s, American Catholic history, the history of the late Cold War (with a particular focus on its impact on the people of Latin America), and the relationship between gender and political and religious cultures. The goal is to create a book that will challenge how people think about the role of religion in women's lives and will compel readers to grapple with a dimension of recent U.S. and global history that is rapidly disappearing from the American public's collective memory.

Dr. Mollin is a member of the Organization of American Historians, the Coordinating Council of Women in History, the Oral History Association, and the Peace History Society, and was a founding co-editor of H-Peace, part of the H-Net consortium of academic listservs. She has been active in the creation of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention on the Virginia Tech campus.


Teaching

U.S. Social and Cultural History
U.S. Women's History
Research Methods

Women's Suffrage cartoon by Lou Rogers

Courses Taught:
Hist 1004 -- Introduction to U.S. History
Hist 2004 -- Historical Methods
Hist 2984 -- Sexuality in American History
Hist 3105 -- Women in U.S. History, through 1865
Hist 3106 -- Women in U.S. History, 1865-present
Hist 5124 -- U.S. History Since 1877
Hist 5934 -- Gender in U.S. History

Teaching American History -- History Scholars Program: The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia

Graduate and Undergraduate research:
Anne Greenwood, "'For Country and for Home': Elite Richmond Women and Changing Southern Womanhood during the First World War" (M.A., 2008)
Jennifer Vipperman, "Student Rights Protests at Virginia Polytechnic Institute" (M.A., 2008)

Gail Marney, "Women and the Pittston Coal Strike of 1989" (M.A., 2007)
• Lindsay Pieper, "Castles Made of Sand: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Contradictions of the 1960s Counterculture"(B.A., 2007)
• Christy Looney, "Beauty and Womanhood in Antebellum America" (B.A., 2006)
Allison Ribaudo, "Rosie the Riveter Doesn't Live Here: Women in Roanoke, Virginia, during the Second World War" (B.A., 2006)
• Rhonda Henkhaus, "Feminism and Democracy in Totalitarian Brazil" (B.A., 2005)

 

last updated: June 11, 2008