Van Gosse
Professional Biography
I came to F&M in 2001, after a varied career in academia and the nonprofit sector, including teaching at Wellesley College and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and working for national organizations like Peace Action.
My teaching and scholarship focused on several overlapping areas: American political development and the special role that the African American struggle for citizenship has played in our history; American culture and society in the Cold War era and since. I also have a special interest in cultural history, looking at popular music and Hollywood movies.
Originally, my scholarship covered the social movements of the United States after World War II, the so-called New Left. I authored or edited several books on this subject, with a particular focus on the movements "in solidarity" with social change in Latin America, from the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s through the Central American wars of the 1980s. This led me to an interest in the long-term political evolution of American democracy and the question of Black Power; whether or not African Americans would ever be, or could ever be, "first-class citizens." To my surprise, I have found that this question was debated as far back as the 1790s, and that black Americans were always part of that debate. I am now deep into a book project called Black Power in White America.
Lecturing at the University of Havana in 2003, and a year of teaching in Ireland as a Fulbright Scholar in 2005-2006, has given me a renewed appreciation for liberal arts education, and the enormous resources and gravity that F&M brings to that task.
From 2004 through the present, I have helped direct our on-campus "F&M Votes" campaign, a joint student/staff/faculty effort which seeks to both register and turn-out our entire student body on Election Day.
Academic Employment:
Associate Professor, Department of History, Franklin and Marshall College, 2008-
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Franklin and Marshall College, 2001-2008
Visiting Assistant Professor, American Studies Program, Trinity College, 1994-95
Adjunct Lecturer, George Mason University, 1993, 1996-1997
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wellesley College, 1991-1992
Lecturer, Rutgers University [Summers], 1987-1991
Related Experience:
•Historians Against the War, Co-Chair, 2003-2004, member of Steering Committee, 2005-present.
•Radical History Review, Business Manager (2002-present); Book Review Editor (2001-2002); Chair of Editorial Collective (1994-2001); Coordinator of Teaching Section (1993-1995); Member (1990-present).
•Member, Task Force on Terrorism, Foreign Policy in Focus Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC.
•External Examiner in Diplomatic History, Swarthmore College, 1994.
•Logistics Coordinator, 1990 Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians. •Crossroads, Book Review Editor/Contributing Editor (1993-1997).
•Music Critic, 1979-1984 (published 60 feature articles and reviews in the Village Voice, Melody Maker (U.K.), Musician, Player and Listener, Music and Sound Output, etc.).
Professional Employment:
Organizing Director, Peace Action (formerly SANE/Freeze), 1995-2000.
Executive Director, Center for Democracy in the Americas, 1993-1994.
Development Director, Center for Democracy in the Americas, 1992-1993.
College Service:
Faculty Council, Elected Member, 2007-2008.
Co-Chair, F&M Votes Campaign, 2004-Present.
U.S. History Instructor, Clemente Program, 2006-Present.
Faculty Committee on Campus Life, 2006-2007.
Departmental Website Coordinator, 2003-Present.
Sexual Assault Prevention Program, 2006.
Women's and Gender Studies Committee, 2006-2007.
Africana Studies Committee, 2004-2005, 2007-2008.
History Club Adviser, 2003-2005, 2006-2007.
History Department Graduate School Forum, April 2005: Organizer.
Mayaud Summer Study/Travel Grant Committee, 2003-2004.
Education
A.B., History, Columbia University, January 1983
Ph.D., Rutgers University, January 1992
Grants & Awards
Grants and Fellowships:
Fulbright Lecturer, University College Cork, Ireland, 2005-2006
Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2000-2001
Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies, 1998-99
Awards:
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize in Modern History, Columbia University, 1982.
Excellence Fellow, Rutgers University, 1985-1989.
Publications
Books:
We Are Americans: Black Politics and the Origins of Black Power in Antebellum America (forthcoming).
Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 2006, will be published in translation in People's Republic of China.
The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: St. Martin's Press/Bedford Books, 2004).
Editor (with Richard Moser), The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Temple University Press, 2003).
Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993).
Articles and Book Chapters:
"American Colonial Empire," in Peter N. Stearns, General Editor, Encyclopedia of the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
"Moving Into `The Master's House': The State-Nation and Black Power in the United States," in Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills and Scott Rutherford, eds., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009).
"`As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends': The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772-1861," American Historical Review (October, 2008), 1003-1028.
"The Cuban Revolution and the New Left," in Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, eds., The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 526-529.
"More Than Just a Politician: Notes Towards a Life and Times of Harold Cruse," in Jerry G. Watts, ed., The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Revisited: A Thirty-Year Retrospective (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 2004),17-40.
"Postmodern America: A New Democratic Order in a Second Gilded Age" and "Unpacking the Vietnam Syndrome: The 1973 Coup in Chile and the Rise of Anti-Interventionist Politics," in Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Temple University Press, 2003), 1-36, 100-113.
"A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left," in Roy Rosenzweig and Jean-Christophe Agnew, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (London: Blackwell, 2002), 277-302.
"`We are all highly adventurous': Fidel Castro and the Romance of the White Guerrilla, 1957-58," in Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of American Imperialism During the Early Cold War, 1945-1963 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 238-256.
"El Salvador," in John Whiteclay Chambers II., ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 246-247.
"Black America Greets the Revolution: The African-American Press on Cuba During 1959," in Lisa Brock and Digna Castaneda, eds., Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 266-280.
"`El Salvador Is Spanish For Vietnam': The Politics of Solidarity and the New Immigrant Left, 1955-1993" in Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Immigrant Left (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 302-329.
"Active Engagement: The Legacy of Central America Solidarity," NACLA Report (March/April 1995), 22-29.
"`To Organize in Every Neighborhood, In Every Home': The Gender Politics of American Communists Between the Wars," Radical History Review (Spring 1991), 109-141.
"`The North American Front': Central American Solidarity in the Reagan Era," in Michael Sprinker and Mike Davis, eds., Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980's, Volume III of The Year Left (New York: Verso, 1988), 1-43.
Reviews:
Review of Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform, in American Historical Review (Spring, 2008), 520-521.
Review of Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, And The Making Of A U.S. Third World Left, in Left History (Fall-Winter, 2007), 161-162.
Review of William H. Chafe, Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America in Journal of Southern History (February 2007), 215-216.
"Heroes and Villains: Picturing the IWW" [review of Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, eds., WOBBLIES! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World] in Reviews in American History (March 2006), 57-63.
Review of Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 in Journal of American History (December 1999), 1311-1312.
Review of Fritz Fischer, Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s in Journal of American History (June 2000), 307.
"Mickey Mouse and Chain Gangs, Hot Jazz, and the CIO" [review of Michael Denning, The Cultural Front] in American Quarterly (December 1999), 931-939.
Review of Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement, in Peace and Change (January 1998),103-107.
"Consensus and Contradiction in Textbook Treatments of the Sixties," Journal of American History (September 1995), 658-669.
Review of Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten and George Snedeker, eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U. S. Communism, in Science and Society (1995), 107-109.
"Our Left" (review of Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Encyclopedia of the American Left) in Radical History Review (Winter 1994), 206-212.
"Paterson, 1913" [review of Anne Huber Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 and Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike 1913] in Radical History Review (Fall 1990), 169-176.
Interviews:
"Home Rule: An Interview with Amiri Baraka," in "Transnational Black Studies," Special Issue of the Radical History Review 87 (Fall 2003), 109-126.
"Red Feminism: A Conversation with Dorothy Healey," Science and Society (Winter 2003), 511-518.
"Locating the Black Intellectual: An Interview with Harold Cruse," Radical History Review (Spring 1998), 96-120, reprinted in William Jelani Cobb, ed., The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 281-297.
Journals Edited:
"The Irish Question" (with Donal O Drisceoil and Conor McGrady), Radical History Review (Spring 2009).
"Terror and History," Radical History Review (Winter 2003).
"Market, Politics, Identities: What's Left" (with James Livingston), Radical History Review (Winter 2000).
"Past Politics, Present Questions" (with Eliza Reilly & Amber Hollibaugh), Radical History Review (Spring 1998).
"Imperialism: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?", Radical History Review (Fall 1993).
Presentations
Invited Lectures:
"Moving Into the Master's House: The State-Nation and Black Power in the United States," keynote presentation at the New World Coming: The Global Sixties conference, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, June 14, 2007.
"`It Is Not A True Democracy, But A Bastard Republicanism': The Moral Economy of Black Politics in the Early Republic," in "History Workshop" series sponsored by the History Department at the University of Delaware, February 27, 2007.
"How `Black Power' Remaps American Political History," keynote presentation for Re-Mapping the United States Micro-Course at the Institute for Critical United States Studies, Duke University, February 17, 2006.
"The War on Iraq and U.S. Foreign Policy," Annual Committee on Peace Studies Lecture, Purdue University, April 20, 2005.
"Making Sense of the Cold War, At Home and Abroad," presented at American Social History Project Teaching American History workshop for high school teachers, New York City, March 14, 2005.
"Contemporary America," a series of lectures presented at the Center for the Study of the United States, University of Havana, May 14-19, 2003.
Conference Papers:
"What David Walker Knew: Leveraging Black Power in the British Atlantic, 1772-1861," given at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Oakland, California, October 24, 2006.
"Rethinking the Black Republicans, 1880-1930," presented at the Eleventh Annual Central Pennsylvania Consortium Africana Studies Conference, Franklin and Marshall College, April 1, 2005.
"Rethinking the Historiography of Black Nationalism and Black Power," presented at the annual conference of The Historical Society, Boothbay Harbor, Maine, June 5, 2004.
"The Appeal of the Cuban Revolution: Yanqui Fidelismo In Its Various Guises," presented at the Hispanic Caribbean Conference of the Central Pennsylvania Consortium, Dickinson College, October 16, 2003.
"The Terms of Black Power," presented at the Works-in-Progress series, Rutgers University History Department, October 25, 2002.
"Detroit, 1946-1964 and the Rise of `Premature' Black Power," a talk for the English Graduate Students Association, George Washington University, March 2000.
"Unpacking the `Vietnam Syndrome': Popular Anti-Interventionism and Chile Solidarity, 1973-1979," presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York City, January 1997.
"The Central America Solidarity Movement," presented at the 1995 International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington DC, September 1995.
"Black America Greets the Revolution: The African-American Press on Cuba During 1959," presented at the 1994 International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Atlanta, March 1994.
"A Momentous Defeat: the Bay of Pigs and the Break-Up of Cold War Liberalism," presented at the Annual Conference of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Conference for Peace Research in History, Charlottesville, June 1993.
"The Cuban Revolution and the Origins of the New Left: Revising the History of Declension," presented at the Towards a History of the Sixties Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, April 1993.
"America's Romance with Fidel: Cuba and the Intellectuals," presented at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, New York City, December 1992.
"The Gender Politics of American Communists, 1919-1941," presented at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington DC, March 1990.
