Michelle Mart was a Carson Fellow from August 2012 to January 2013 and from May 2014 to July 2014.
Michelle Mart is currently working on a cultural history of synthetic pesticides in the United States from 1945 to the present. Her project focuses primarily on environmental history and builds on some of the themes explored in her earlier research with its interdisciplinary approach to American culture in the late twentieth century. Her 2006/7 book, Eye on Israel: How the United States Came to View Israel as an Ally, is a work in the then-relatively new subfield of cultural diplomacy, looking at the intersections between culture and foreign policy. Mart is an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, Berks campus where she teaches a variety of courses in American history, including environmental, foreign policy, and twentieth-century topics. She earned her PhD from New York University under the direction of Marilyn Young, her MA at the University of Michigan, and her BA at Cornell University.
RCC Research Project: Pesticides, A Love Story. (PDF, 13 kb)
Film Interview with Michelle Mart
Selected Publications:
- “U.S.-Israeli Relations and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East.” In A Guide to U.S. Foreign Policy: A Diplomatic History, edited by Robert McMahon and Thomas Zeiler. Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, forthcoming.
- “Rhetoric and Response: The Cultural Impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” Left History 14, no.2 (2010): 31–57.
- Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally, State University of New York Press, 2006, 2007.
- “Eleanor Roosevelt, Liberalism, and Israel.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 3 (2006): 58–89.
- “Tough Guys and American Cold War Policy: Images of Israel, 1948-1960,” in Diplomatic History 20, no. 3 (1996): 357–380.