Please join us for a lecture by Kristen E. Gwinn, Ph.D. about her book, Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism.
Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 4:30 p.m.
McCabe Library Popular Reading Room
Swarthmore College
Maps and driving instructions are available
Download flyers (keystroke Ctrl+S in Google Docs)
Visit the display of Balch’s books, letters, and artifacts just inside the front door of McCabe Library.
Emily Greene Balch was the second U.S. woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded in 1946. Balch was a humanitarian, internationalist, and professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College. She helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom during World War I and served as president of the U.S. section of that organization in the 1930s. With the rise of militarism in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, Balch wrestled with her beliefs in peace, and she focused on the fate of refugees and displaced persons from Europe and combined her ideas on internationalism, global citizenship, and cultural diversity. Kristen Gwinn (visiting scholar at Northwestern University) has written the first scholarly biography of this fascinating woman. Her talk will contextualize Balch’s leadership, intellectual role, and philosophy in the development of American attitudes toward war and women in the twentieth century.
Kristen E. Gwinn is a visiting scholar with the history department at Northwestern University. She holds a PhD in History from George Washington University and a Master’s Degree in International Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism, and served as a graduate editorial fellow for The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: The Human Rights Years, 1945–1948. She believes that utilizing technology to educate one another about history is of vital importance. She builds technological components, such as web sites and databases, to further this mission through her consulting agency HistoryIT (www.historyit.com). She also contributes to and manages several historical web sites, including www.ja1325.org and www.herhatwasinthering.org.
Sponsored by the Peace Collection, the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and SwatFems.
Contact: Wendy Chmielewski (wchmiel1) or Lee Smithey (lsmithe1)