Penny Von Eschen

Penny M. Von Eschen is L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Cornell University. She is author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, (Harvard, 2004), and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell, 1997).

She is a co-editor of Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, Columbia University Press, 2007; and of American Studies: An Anthology(Blackwell, 2009).

Recent essays include “Di Eagle and di Bear: Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Cold War? in Ronald Radano and Teju Olaniyan, eds., Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, (Duke, 2016); “Memory and the study of US Foreign Relations,” in Frank Costiogliola and Michael Hogan eds., Explaining US Foreign Relations, (Cambridge, 2016); and “Locating the Transnational in the Cold War,” in Richard Immerman and Petra Goode, eds., The Oxford Handbook on the Cold War, 2013.

She co-curated “Jam Sessions: American’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” a photography exhibition on the jazz ambassador tours, with Meridian International Center, Washington D.C., that opened in April 2008, and toured globally as well as in the United States.

Select publications

• Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Harvard University Press, 2004, First Runner-Up for the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, 2005.

• Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, Cornell University Press, 1997; winner of the 1998 Stuart L. Bernath book prize of Historians of Foreign Relations; and the Myers Outstanding Book Award, of the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

• Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen co-editors; includes, Penny M. Von Eschen, “Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad: Rethinking Hard and Soft Power from the Outside In,” Columbia University Press, 2007.

• American Studies: An Anthology, Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen editors, Blackwell Press, January 2009.

• Book manuscript in progress: Cold War Nostalgia: The Wages of Memory in the Post-1989 World, Harvard University Press.