Marian Mollin

Short Biography

Marian 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 (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 written elsewhere about the American women's suffrage, gender and the abolitionist movement, women in the civil rights movement, and student dissent in the 1960s. Her current 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 book places Ford's life and death squarely within the context of postwar American women's history, the history of the 1960s, American Catholic history, the history of Latin America during the latter part of the Cold War, and the influence of gender on political and religious cultures. Mollin received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is now Associate Professor and Associate Chair of History at Virginia Tech where she teaches courses on gender history and has been active in the creation of the Virginia Tech Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.