Penny M. Von Eschen is professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan. She is author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004) and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997), winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others. She is coeditor of Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History (2007) and American Studies: An Anthology (2008), and is currently working on a transnational history of Cold War nostalgia.

Lecture topics:

• Cold War Nostalgia: From “Stalin World Theme Park”, Lithuania, to the International Spy Museum, Washington, D.C.
• Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War: The U.S. State Department Jazz Tours
• Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad: Rethinking Power after 1945

Viewed Saturday, November 21, 2009