The Department of American Studies invites you to a lecture by 

Penny Von Eschen is Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, and the author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard, 2006) and Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell, 1997). Her current book project is tentatively entitled “’God I Miss The Cold War’: Memory, Nostalgia, and Global Disorder Since 1989.”

Von Eschen co-curated the photography exhibition “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” which opened in 2008 at the Meridian International Center in Washington, D.C. and continued as a traveling exhibition in the U.S. and internationally. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, among them the 2008 Brubeck Institute Award for Distinguished Achievement.