Professor Marilyn Young of New York University will deliver this year’s Bland-Lee Lectures at Clark University on Wednesday and Thursday, March 17 and 18. She will be speaking about “Necessary Wars of Choice: Counterinsurgency and the American Way of War” and “Korea: Turning up the Heat on the Cold War.” Both lectures will be held at 4:00 pm in the Grace Conference Room of Higgins University Center.
In 1969 Mr. and Mrs. Bland established the Chester and Shirley Bland History Fund in honor of Professor Dwight E. Lee. The lecture series supported by this gift brings distinguished historians to Clark to present their scholarship in a free and open public setting.
Professor Young received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1963. She taught at the University of Michigan before joining New York University in 1980, where she is a full professor of History. Her research and teaching cover the history of U.S. foreign policy; the politics and culture of post-war United States; the history of modern China; the history and culture of Vietnam; and Third World women and gender. As an engaged teacher, scholar, and public intellectual, she is a fitting speaker to commemorate Clark Professor Dwight E. Lee and the generous gift of his student Chester Bland.
A respected and engaged scholar, Dr. Young is the newly elected Vice-President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). In 2000-2001 she was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. From 2001-2004 she directed the NYU International Center for Advanced Studies Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict and she is currently co-director of NYU’s Tamiment Library Center for the Study of the U.S. and the Cold War.
She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, notably The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, winner of the 1991 Berkshire Women’s History Prize. Her most recent projects include Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (2009), Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (2007), and The New American Empire (2005).
