Penny Von Eschen
· William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and American Studies at the University of VirginiaVerifiedUniversity of Virginia · Recreation, Sport and Tourism Studies
Active 2002–2026
About
Penny Von Eschen is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of African American history, cultural history, the global cold war, and the study of the United States in global and transnational dimensions. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in the Department of History in 1994, after earning her M.A. from Columbia in 1987 and her B.A. in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1982. Von Eschen has authored several influential books, including 'Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989,' 'Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War,' and 'Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957.' Her work explores themes of Cold War triumphalism, jazz diplomacy, and anticolonial movements, contributing significantly to understanding the cultural and political dimensions of American history and foreign relations. She has also co-edited important anthologies and curated exhibitions related to jazz diplomacy, and she is currently working on a book project examining crises of authority in anticolonial counterpublics following World War II.
Research topics
- Geography
- Business
Selected publications
Patriotism and Authoritarian Resistance
The American Historical Review · 2026-03-10
article1st authorCorrespondingThinking with Paul Kramer's “Power and Connection”
Modern American History · 2024-03-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingI am delighted to have an opportunity to reflect on Paul Kramer's rich and highly influential “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World.” Since its publication in 2011, “Power and Connection” has been a cornerstone of my graduate U.S. in the World classes and has been invoked in every graduate qualifying exam. The essay has had a direct and indirect influence on the wave of innovative scholarship that has been produced in the past decade. I first want to note some of the essay's important interventions. Then, rather than attempting to extend or update Kramer's extensive historiographical review, I want to think with “Power and Connection” by taking up two of Kramer's suggestions and discussions. First, I take up his suggestion to think about imperial power through a Gramscian frame of domination and consent, arguing that the concept of hegemonic struggle is critical for thinking about power within empires and shifts in global imperial formations. Second, I engage Kramer's discussion of the relationship between imperial and transnational histories, arguing that scholars need to consider transnationalism as a highly specific and contingent political formation, as well as an analytic category and sometimes actors' category.
New York University Press eBooks · 2022
- Geography
This book had its origins in a chance encounter on a mid-Manhattan street in the late summer of 1993.I had just left the offices of the radio station WBAI when I bumped into David Du Bois, whom I had known as a result of my earlier research on the life of W. E. B. Du Bois
Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-08-12
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-11-18
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingImperial visions of the world in US culture from 1945 to the present follow an arc moving from a robust and confident empire that insisted that it was not an empire, but the legitimate leader of the free world, to visions of a troubled empire, dark, morally ambiguous, and embattled from without and within. Exploring popular culture as a critical space of meaning making, fundamental to understanding how Americans imaged themselves in the world, this chapter charts an uneven zig-zag in dominant American constructions of empire. It begins with archetypical cultural expressions of the US relation to the non-American world in the 1950s that celebrated a robust “American Century.” Moving forward, with domestic and global challenges to US racism and the American war in Vietnam, ideas of American innocence and images of US as a benevolent force for good in the world began to unravel. With the exceptionalist narrative in disarray by the mid-1970s, far more critical and/or ambivalent renderings of the role of the US in the world emerged.
Front Matter, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Issue 21, Spring 2021
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies · 2021-08-16
paratextOpen access7 The End of the Age of Three Worlds and the Making of the Trump Presidency
Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2020-07-30
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingDuke University Press eBooks · 2020
- Business
This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and decon struction of cultural and po liti cal borders, the fluid meaning of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists.
2020-07-24
book-chapterOpen access2020-09-27
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 24 shared
Pierre‐Yves Saunier
Rockefeller Foundation
- 16 shared
James E. Hatch
Western University
- 16 shared
Roselyn Richardson
Wayne State University
- 16 shared
Esther Jackson
Wayne State University
- 16 shared
C.C. Lee
Wayne State University
- 16 shared
Diane Madison
Wayne State University
- 16 shared
Ula Taylor
Wayne State University
- 16 shared
E. Allen
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
Awards & honors
- First Runner-Up for the John Hope Franklin Prize of the Amer…
- Winner of the 1998 Stuart L. Bernath book prize of Historian…
- Myers Outstanding Book Award of the Gustavus Myers Center fo…
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