Marian Mollin

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.