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
	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

My research explores the connections between gender, protest, activism, and culture, with a focus on the history of American social movements. In Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), I examine 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. I have published related articles in Oral History Review, Radical History Review, and History Compass, and have contributed to a variety of digital history projects, including the NEH-funded Digital History Reader.

My current book project, The Power of Faith: Understanding the Life and Death of Sister Ita Ford, is a historical biography of one of the four North 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, recent U.S. history, the history of women religious, the dynamics of late Cold War era, and North American and Latin American Catholic history. Ford's extraordinary life, which straddled momentous changes in Catholic, U.S., and Latin American history, provides a powerful opportunity to explore how gender and religous faith instersected to shape identity and participation in transnational efforts for social justice. Ultimately, this work will deepen and complicate the historical understanding of the "Sixties" and challenge how people think about the role of religion in American women's lives.

I am 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. I have 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

Fall 2009 : • Hist 5934 -- Gender in U.S. History Courses Taught in Previous Semesters • Hist 1004 -- Introduction to U.S. History • Hist 2004 -- Historical Methods • Hist 3105 -- Women in U.S. History, through 1865 • Hist 3106 -- Women in U.S. History, 1865-present • Hist 3164 -- Sexuality in American History • Hist 5124 -- U.S. History Since 1877 • Teaching American History -- History Scholars Program: The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia Graduate and Undergraduate research directed: • 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 12, 2009