OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile

Penny M. Von Eschen is professor of history at Cornell University. She is the 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.