Basic FactsTeaching Position:
Associate Professor, History Department, Ohio State University, 2004-present
Personal AnecdoteI became a historian because I got arrested in college. Or, perhaps I got arrested because I believed in the power of history. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan and immigrated with my family to Spokane, Washington when I was six years old. I helped my family run a restaurant and then a convenience store until I left to attend college at Stanford University. When I was a sophomore, I became involved in a campaign to lobby for ethnic studies and ethnic student services. There had been a racially motivated attack against the African American theme dorm at Stanford. I thought such behavior was inappropriate, and it reminded me of the harassment and discrimination that my family experienced in the predominantly white community of Spokane. In response, I became a student activist. I worked with people of varying backgrounds to advocate for more courses that examined race and inequality. We also called for more institutional support for ethnic student service centers so that students of color might feel more at home on the college campus. I believed that if all students were exposed to the diversity of American society, they might learn to treat each other with more respect. Through meetings, petitions, rallies and eventually a protest at the president's office which led to our arrest, we succeeded in persuading the university administration to hire the first faculties in Asian American Studies, conduct a review of the African American Studies Program, provide more funding and a full-time dean for the Chicano Student Center, and reexamine the eligibility of Native Hawaiians for affirmative action programs. I subsequently decided to major in American Studies so that I might learn more about the history, politics, and culture of the U.S. After completing an honors thesis on the 1960s social movements in San Francisco Chinatown and working at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, I eventually enrolled in the History Ph.D. program at Stanford. Although these events occurred almost half of my lifetime ago, they remain formative for my intellectual, political, and personal development. Both my research and teaching foreground the analysis of race, gender, class, and nationality in the study of American history. I am particularly interested how categories of social difference and inequality are constructed and intertwined. I also pay close attention to how individuals create meaningful identities and interact with their lived environments. Because my goal is to promote greater understanding of the diversity of American history, I encourage students to think about various ways to study the past and to think about the connections between knowledge gained in the classroom and their experiences in contemporary society. My current research project is very much influenced by my background as a student activist. In"Radicals on the Road: Third World Internationalism and American Orientalism during the Vietnam Era," I explore the travels of American peace activists who criticized the U.S. war in Viet Nam. I am particularly interested in how the experiences of being outside of the U.S. and meeting non-Americans shaped the identities and political beliefs of diverse American activists. My first book, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005) is a biography of a colorful yet largely unrecognized historical figure. Dr. Margaret Chung (1889-1959) was the first known American-born Chinese female physician. She established one of the earliest Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1920s. She also became a prominent celebrity and behind-the-scenes political broker during Sino-Japanese and Second World Wars. During this period, her home was the place to be in San Francisco. Soldiers, movie stars, and politicians gathered there to socialize, to show their dedication to the Allied cause, and to express their affection for their"adopted" mother. Chung's surrogate sons numbered in the thousands and included well-known figures such as actor Ronald Reagan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and musician Andre Kostelanetz. Chung even used her fictive kinship network to recruit pilots for the Flying Tigers and lobby for the creation of WAVES, the U.S. women's naval reserve. Because she never married and could not provide a"legitimate" father figure, her"sons" became known as the"Fair-Haired Bastards." Although Chung publicly adopted a maternal identity, she experimented with her gender presentation and developed romantic relationships with other women, such as writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker. My book capitalizes on Chung's uniqueness to examine how American race relations, gender roles, and sexual norms shifted over the course of her lifetime. QuotesBy Judy Tzu-Chun Wu 
vast quantities of BBQ ribs, red beans, and chocolate cake, making up for the dreariness of military fare.
They swapped stories with each other over drinks at the bar. They also caught glimpses of and actually talked
with some of the foremost celebrities of their time: John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Tennessee Williams, Helen Hayes,
Sophie Tucker, Tallulah Bankhead, and many others. At Mom Chung's, they met prominent politicians and military
leaders like Kentucky Senator and future commissioner of baseball"Happy" Chandler and Fleet Admiral of the U.S.
Navy Chester W. Nimitz. --
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu in"Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity"About Judy Tzu-Chun Wu |
edited by Mark Bradley and Paul Kramer).
Basic FactsTeaching Position:
Associate Professor of History, Metropolitan State University, 2002-present
Personal AnecdoteYears ago, when I was a fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, at work on a dissertation on 1960s radicalism, I heavily taxed the interlibrary loan services of the library there. One of the librarians told me at one point, in a confidential tone, that she had been wondering why I was ordering books that could be found only at places like Liberty University-the Lynchburg, Virginia institution founded and led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell. I'm an historian of American politics. I never expected to be an historian of religion. Actually, I never really did become an historian of religion, in any conventional sense. But I did acquire a lasting interest in the intersection of religion and political dissent-a connection I might have expected to encounter if I had undertaken a study of political radicalism in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century America, but one I did not anticipate exploring so deeply while investigating the political left in post-1945 America. Eventually I managed to compress about one-hundred pages on Christian existentialism down to a single chapter. I decided that was about what the topic deserved in the context of a study of white youth radicalism in Austin, Texas, which eventually took the form of a book, The Politics of Authenticity. However, religion is something that pops up in unexpected places when studying American history. I have continued to explore what I call the prophetic dimension of American political radicalism in twentieth-century America-radical politics typically directed toward very nonreligious ends. And I still teach a course on religion and politics in American history. In my new book, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America, I've moved (for now) away from monographic research and toward a synthetic perspective. One of the things I learned in researching my first book is that radical and reform politics in U.S. history have sometimes had more in common than is usually recalled. The left and liberalism are neither mutually exclusive categories nor (as a Fox News viewer might think) identical categories; they are overlapping categories. I emphasize that American radicals, between 1880 and the present, frequently have done the work of liberalism, trying to realize the liberal ideals of constitutional government, natural rights, and other things, while, during at least some of that period, plenty of liberal reformers took a more critical stance toward American capitalism than recent history would lead us to believe. The prophetic stance is visible, too, but in ironic fashion: consciously religious social criticism was pervasive within American reform as well as among radicals in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and even later; but it became the more exclusive province of radicals during the cold war and after, even though recent American radicals have usually been ardently secular people. Go figure. I recently got a message from a student at a seminary in Austin, saying that some folks there are interested in establishing an intentional religious study community. He had read about another such community in the 1950s in The Politics of Authenticity, and wondered if I could send him some documents I had cited in my book. Now I'm glad I held onto those dissertation research files. QuotesBy Doug Rossinow 
intimate quality. In fact, from the nineteenth century to the present, although American radicals and reformers
criticized each other harshly, their disputes were often-although not always-bounded by bedrock liberal assumptions
about the nature of a good society. Left-wing radicals were those who placed extremely high value on equality and
who subjected capitalism to severe moral criticism over its allegedly exploitative and dehumanizing aspect. A
leftist was not necessarily a socialist. Liberals' essential commitments were to individual freedom, natural
rights, constitutional government, and the sovereignty of 'the people'-concepts that, not only in the United
States but also in world history, linked the anti-government liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to the welfare-state liberalism of the twentieth century and beyond. As these definitions suggest,
the line separating leftists from liberals often was smudged or downright invisible, no matter how often people
to either side tried to mark it clearly and impassably....Many of the dissenting forces in American politics were
inhabitants of a deep liberal near-consensus-one also broad enough to include many conservative opponents of
twentieth-century liberalism and the left." -- Doug Rossinow in"Visions of Progress The Left-Liberal
Tradition in America"About Doug Rossinow  Metropolitan State Univ.) has identified as the main thrust of the New Left movement that powered the
youth-driven political and social revolutions of the 1960s. He argues that the New Left resulted from a
reaction to traditional American liberalism, which was seen by New Leftists as"elite-based," and from the
influence of Christian existentialism, which redefined"sin" as"alienation" and"salvation" as"authenticity."
Rossinow meticulously analyzes the interplay of academic politics and Texas state politics on the campus of the
University of Texas, Austin, and shows how the New Left formed its organizational structure and ideological basis.
This is a carefully researched, creative, and intriguing reinterpretation of American history. --
Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego |
in American History. The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998; paper ed., 1999). Rossinow is the co-editor with Rebecca S. Lowen of
The United States Since 1945: Historical Interpretations, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006.
