Marian Mollin

Marian Mollin, Associate Professor of History

_{Department of History

419 Major Williams Hall, 220 Stanger St.

Blacksburg, VA 24061

540-231-8367 | mmollin@vt.edu}

Marian Mollin is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. Her research analyzes the connections between gender, protest, religion, activism, and culture.

Mollin’s 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 U.S. women’s history, social movements and the “global sixties,” the history of women religious, the dynamics of the late Cold War, North American and Latin American Catholic history, and the history of gender, missionaries, and empire. Mollin notes that Ford’s extraordinary life, which straddled momentous changes in Catholic, U.S., and Latin American history, highlights how gender, national identity, and religious faith intersected in the mid- and late-twentieth century to shape transnational efforts for social and political change.

Principal Areas of Research Focus

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

Education

Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst
M.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst
B.S., Cornell University

Professional Roles

Organization of American Historians
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Peace History Society
Conference on the History of Women Religious
Oral History Association

Awards and Honors

Dr. Carroll B. Shannon Excellence in Teaching Award, Virginia Tech, 2016
Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching, Virginia Tech, 2016
Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Tech, 2014
Edward S. Diggs Teaching Scholars Award, Virginia Tech Academy of Teaching Excellence, 2012

Publications

Books

Politics, Power & Playboy: The American Mindset of the 1960s. Edited by Marian Mollin. (Blacksburg: Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019)

The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith, co-edited with Leilah Danielson and Doug Rossinow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Textbooks

Reader. Coauthored with E. Thomas Ewing (Project Director), C. Edward Watson, Robert Stephens, Marian Mollin, David Hicks, Hayward “Woody” Farrar, Mark V. Barrow Jr., Kathleen Jones, and Daniel Thorp. 2006

Journal Articles

“Ita Ford and the Spirit of Social Change,” in Leilah Danielson, Marian Mollin, and Doug Rossinow, eds., The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 255-276.

“The Solidarity of Suffering: Gender, Cross-Cultural Contact, and the Foreign Mission Work of Sister Ita Ford,” Peace & Change 42.2 (April 2017), 232-252.

“Radical Pacifism in the Long 1950s: Forging New Forms of Protest and Dissent,” in Howard Brick, ed., A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 265-274.

“Women’s Struggles within the American Radical Pacifist Movement,” History Compass 7.3 (May 2009), 1064-1090.

“Communities of Resistance: Women and the Catholic Left of the Late 1960s,” Oral History Review 31.2 (Summer/Fall 2004), 29-51.

“The Limits of Egalitarianism: Radical Pacifism, Civil Rights, and the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation,” Radical History Review 88 (Winter 2004), 112-138.

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