Participant Info

First Name
Denise
Last Name
Lynn
Affiliation
University of Southern Indiana
Website URL
drdeniselynn.com
Keywords
Gender, Race, Communism, Anti-Fascism, Anti-Communism, Birth Control, Abortion
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Dr. Denise Lynn is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana, United States. She is a blogger for Black Perspectives https://www.aaihs.org/black-perspectives/ and the Vice-President of the Historians of American Communism. She received her Ph.D. in History in 2006 from Binghamton University, SUNY. Dr. Lynn’s research focus has been on women in the American Communist Party during the Popular Front. She is particularly interested in rank-and-file women in the Party who operated outside of the Central Committee. Dr. Lynn’s publications include the internationalist perspective of Communist Party women in the campaigns to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. She has published on communist led meat boycotts in 1935 as well as fears of Nazi pronatalist policies and sister policies in the United States that restricted women’s access to birth control. Dr. Lynn has also explored the lives of individual women in the Communist Party, including Claudia Jones and Juliet Stuart Poyntz. Her articles have appeared in American Communist History, Women’s History Review, Journal of Cold War Studies, Radical Americas, and Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Dr. Lynn’s manuscript Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz? Gender, Spycraft, and anti-Stalinism in the Early Cold War is available at the University of Massachusetts Press.

Dr. Lynn is currently working on a biography of Claudia Jones and a book on Black Radical women in the anti-Korean war movement.

Recent Publications

Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz? Gender and Anti-Stalinism in American Anti-Communism. University of Massachusetts Press.

“Friendship Re-forged in Anti-Communism: Herbert Solow, Whittaker Chambers and the Juliet Stuart Poyntz Disappearance” in Post-Cold War Revelations in the American Communist Party, edited by Vernon Pederson, James Ryan, and Katherine Sibley, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

“Women Crusade for Peace: Claudia Jones and the Cold War Peace Movement Forthcoming Journal of Intersectionality

 “Day of Reckoning: Anti-Communist Fantasies in the Carlo Tresca Assassination and Juliet Stuart Poyntz Disappearance,” American Communist History (2020): 1-14.

“Claudia Jones in Exile: Deportation and Policing Blackness in the Cold War,” Twentieth-Century Communism: A Journal of International History Issue 18 (2020): 39-63.

“Silencing Black Radicalism since the Cold War,” Black Perspectives, December 2020

“Black Radical Activists and the Dangers of the Police State,” Black Perspectives, October 2020

“Claudia Jones and the Price of Anticommunism,” Black Perspectives, September 2020

“Surveillance, State Power; and the Activism of Shirley Graham DuBois,” Black Perspectives, September 2020

“Radical Abner Berry and the Limitations of Liberal Alliances,” Black Perspectives, July 2020

“Losing Willie McGee,” Black Pespectives, July 2020

“Confronting Reactionaries: Black Support for the Progressive Party During the Cold War,” Black Perspectives, May 2020

“Charlotta Bass for Vice-President: America’s Two-Parties and the Black Vote,” Black Perspectives, January 2020

“DuBois and the Jefferson School of Social Science,” Marxist Sociology Blog, October 2019, (https://marxistsociology.org/2019/10/du-bois-and-the-jefferson-school/)

Co-Authored with Sakina Hughes and Aimee Adam, “Race and Racism in the Historical Imagination: Slavery and Civil Rights in Popular Culture,” Volume 22 Midwest Social Sciences Journal, 2019, pp. 85-100.

“The Disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poyntz,” Laura Ansley, ed., Killing Clio Series, Nursing Clio, (https://nursingclio.org/2019/06/13/the-disappearance-of-juliet-stuart-poyntz/), June 2019.

“Enlightening the Working Class: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Jefferson School of Social Science,”32:3 Socialism and Democracy, 2018, pp. 164-180. Invited publication

“Reproductive Sovereignty in Soviet and American Socialism During the Great Depression,” 17:1, American Communist History Journal September 2018.

Fascism and the Family: American Communist women͛s anti-fascism during the Ethiopian Invasion and the Spanish Civil War, 15:2, American Communist History Journal, December 2016, 177-190.

Anti-Nazism and the Fear of Pro-Natalism in the American Popular Front, 1:1, Radical Americas Journal, December 2016, 25-43.

͞The Historical Erasure of Violence Against Black Women, January 2018 (https://www.aaihs.org/the-historical-erasure-of-violence-against-black-women/)

͞The Communist Reimagining of Black History, March 2018 (https://www.aaihs.org/the-communist-reimagining-of-black-history/)

Claudia Jones and Ending the Neglect of Black Women, March 2018 (https://www.aaihs.org/claudia-jones-and-ending-the-neglect-of-black-women/)

Black Women and the Scottsboro Boys, May 2018 (https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-and-the-scottsboro-boys/)

“Before the Central Park Five there was the Trenton Six,” July 2019 (https://www.aaihs.org/before-the-central-park-five-there-was-the-trenton-six/)

“Claudia Jones against the Korean War,” September 2019 (https://www.aaihs.org/claudia-jones-against-the-korean-war/)

“The Killing of John Derrick,” October 2019 (https://www.aaihs.org/the-killing-of-john-derrick/)

Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
20th century
Expertise by Topic
Environment, Gender, Migration & Immigration, Race, Women