AMP Advisory Council

Wendy Chmielewski is the George R. Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and an authority on social and peace movements in the United States with particular expertise in women in intentional communities, women’s history, and women and the peace movement through the 19th and 20th centuries.  Her current research interests are on women in the U.S. who ran, and were elected, to public office before 1920; and investigating the role of women in the mid-19th century transatlantic peace movement and reform politics in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Her publications include Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States, edited with Louis Kern and Marlyn Klee-Hartzell (Syracuse University Press, 1993); “‘Strawberries and Cream’:  The Role of Food in Gender Relations and Community Life at Oneida,” in Eating in Eden: Food in American Utopias, edited by Etta Madden and Martha Finch (University of Nebraska Press, 2006); “‘Mid the Din a Dove Appeared’: Women’s Work in the Nineteenth-Century Peace Movement,” in Over Here: A European Journal of American Culture (Winter 1997); and a book Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy, edited with Marilyn Fischer and Carol Nackenoff (University of Illinois Press, 2009).

The Swarthmore College Peace Collection was established about 1930 when Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams of Hull-House, donated her books and papers related to peace to Swarthmore.  The Swarthmore College Peace Collection has since grown to hold the papers of many of the country’s major peace organizations and important peace activists, as well as more than 12,000 books and pamphlets, 3,000 periodical titles, 15,000 linear feet of manuscripts, 50,000 images, memorabilia, and audio visual items.  It is used by scholars and researchers worldwide.

Chmielewski received her B.A. from Goucher College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton.

• E: wchmiel1@swarthmore.edu
• P: 610.328.8557