Steering Committee

Marc Becker teaches Latin American history at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, with a special interest in Indigenous and peasant movements in 20th-century Ecuador. Among his books is Contemporary Latin American Revolutions (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). He has been active in H-PAD since its founding as Historians Against the War (HAW) in 2003, and was co-chair of HAW from 2008 to 2017. He has managed the organization’s website throughout.

Mara Dodge (currently on leave) teaches US history at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, where she is active in the statewide teachers union and editor of the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, published by Westfield State. Her political activism began with Central America solidarity and South Africa anti-apartheid work in the 1980s, and she has served on the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017.

Carolyn “Rusti” Eisenberg is a historian of US foreign relations who teaches at Hofstra University. Her most recent book, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia (Oxford U. Press, 2003), won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history and diplomacy. She has been on the Steering Committee of HAW / H-PAD since 2004, serving as the legislative coordinator, and is a co-founder Brooklyn for Peace.

Van Gosse teaches US history at Franklin and Marshall University, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century social movements. (His most recent book is The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (U. of North Carolina Press, 2021). A former staff member of the national organization Peace Action, he was a founding co-chair of Historians Against the War in 2003 and has been a co-chair of the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017.

Mary (Molly) Nolan is a professor emerita of European and transatlantic history at New York University and a longtime activist in Brooklyn for Peace and other groups. Among her  books is The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge U. Press, 2012).In H-PAD, where she has been a Steering Committee member since 2018, she maintains the Culture Wars Archive of articles on right-wing attacks on education and on resistance to those attacks.

Jim O’Brien is a freelance editor and indexer and former part-time teacher at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He was co-chair of the HAW Steering Committee from 2007 to 2017. Since 2009, he has sent messages every few weeks to the HAW / H-PAD email list with links to “recent articles of interest” that offer historical perspectives on issues important to the organization.

Margaret Power is a professor emerita of Latin American and women’s history at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Her most recent book is a history of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Solidarity Across the Americas (U. of North Carolina Press, 2023). She has been a leading figure in HAW / H-PAD since 2003 and co-chair of the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017.

Prasannan Parthasarathi is Professor of South Asian History at Boston College. He is a longtime activist for peace and justice and has been on the H-PAD steering committee since 2023. He also serves on the board of Massachusetts Peace Action. He is writing a book on environment, agriculture and labor in nineteenth-century South India.

Ellen Schrecker is a professor emerita of history at Yeshiva University and a well-known historian both of McCarthyism and of higher education in the US, most recently in The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (U. of Chicago Press, 2021). As a member of the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017, her principal focus is on threats to academic freedom and to the freedom to learn. She co-edited (with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth) The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press, 2024).

Kevin Young teaches Latin American history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has also written widely on power dynamics in US society. His book Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won came out in May 2024 from PM Press. He has served on the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017, with special interest in using new media forms such as podcasts and videos to reach younger audiences.