Dunn, Joe P. 1945-

PERSONAL:

Born September 21, 1945, in Cape Girardeau, MO; son of Lyman (a dental technician) and Louise (an educator) Dunn; married Jeanette R. Dunn (a college administrator), May 25, 1972; children: Jarrett P. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Southeast Missouri State University, B.S. (magna cum laude), 1967; University of Missouri, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1973; pursued postdoctoral studies at Duke University, 1981.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Spartanburg, SC. Office—Converse College, Spartanburg, SC 29302. E-mail—joe.dunn@converse.edu.

CAREER:

Academic and historian. University of Maryland, European campuses, lecturer, 1973-76; Converse College, Spartanburg, SC, assistant professor, 1976-81, associate professor, 1981-88, professor of history, 1988—, department chair, 1990—, Charles A. Dana Professor of History and Politics, 1991—. Frank and Louise Stephans fellow at the University of Missouri, 1972-73; visiting professor of history at University of Iceland, 2005; on board of directors for the Greater Spartanburg Ministries, 2001-06, and the Columbia, SC, Medical Missions, Inc., 2005—. Military service: U.S. Army, 1969-70, served in the 199th Infantry Brigade, in Vietnam; became sergeant.

MEMBER:

Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, American Studies Association, American Culture Association, Popular Culture Association, American Political Science Association, Middle East and Islamic Studies Society, Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces & Society, South Carolina Historical Association, South Carolina Political Science Association, National Collegiate Honors Council, Association for Asian Studies, Middle East Council of the Carolinas.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Kathryne Amelia Brown Award, 1988, for excellence in teaching; Joseph J. Malone faculty fellow, 1990, 1992, 2001; South Carolina Governor's Distinguished Professor, 1991, 1992, 1999, 2002; U.S. Professor of the Year nominee, Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, 1995, 1996, 2002; citation for outstanding teaching in political science, American Political Science Association, 2001; Scholarship and Creative Achievement Award, 2003; Lifetime Achievement Award, Model Arab League, National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, 2006; recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

WRITINGS:

Teaching the Vietnam War: Resources and Assessments, Center for the Study of Armament and Disarmament, California State University (Los Angeles, CA), 1990.

(Editor, with Howard L. Preston) The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-first Century, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1991.

Desk Warrior: Memoirs of a Combat REMF, Pearson/Custom (Boston, MA), 1999, 2nd edition, Pearson/Custom (Boston, MA), 2005.

(Editor, with Melissa Walker and Jeanette R. Dunn) Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, SC), 2003.

(With Louise P. Dunn) A Good and Ordinary Life: A Memoir of the Rural Midwest, Southeast Missouri University Press (Cape Girardeau, MO), 2008.

Contributor of chapters to various books. Contributor of articles to periodicals and academic journals, including Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, HistoryTeacher, Department Chair, Journal of Political Science, Teaching Professor, American Veterans Journal: Journal of the Vietnam Veterans Institute, Organization of American Historians Council of Chairs Newsletter, Academic Leader, College Teaching, AECD Advisor, National Honors Report, Political Science Teacher, Journal of American Culture, Bulletin of Bibliography, Social Education, Air University Review, Clearing House, Social Studies, Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, Armed Forces and Society, Naval War College Review, Military Review, Converse Studies, Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College, Cross Currents, Connections, Newslines, Converse Bulletin, American National Biography, Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, Pandora: The Humanities, and Missouri Historical Review. Contributor of hundreds of book reviews to various periodicals and academic journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joe P. Dunn is an American academic and historian. Dunn grew up and completed his higher education in Missouri. He taught in several countries in Europe before settling at Spartanburg, South Carolina's Converse College in 1976. Dunn's research interests include U.S. history and foreign policy, the Vietnam War era, and international terrorism and political violence.

A Vietnam veteran himself, Dunn published his first book, Teaching the Vietnam War: Resources and Assessments, in 1990 through the Center for the Study of Armament and Disarmament of California State University. The book provides a personal perspective in guiding educators and academics to alternative approaches to teaching about the Vietnam War in the classroom. Edited with Howard L. Preston in 1991, The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-first Century projects current trends in the South, imagining how the region may shape itself and be shaped in the future.

In 2003 Dunn edited Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective with Melissa Walker and Jeanette R. Dunn. The book was the result of two years of work after a conference held at Converse College on the status of women. Consisting of seven essays, the book gives particular attention to the changing role of southern women and the challenges they face in expanding their opportunities. The essayists take different approaches to their topic, covering contemporary and historical topics, but all deal with race, class, and the relationship between women in these different categories. Kathryn McKee, writing in the Women's Review of Books, noted that the book makes "significant strides toward a commendable goal" of sidelining separate histories of southern women and relating a shared history of black and white southern women alike. McKee commented that the book does "a particularly good job of contextualizing the lives and concerns of blue-collar women, black and white, for whom ‘belledom’ would always have been a status for someone else to claim." She outlined that "each essay serves primarily as a scholarly review of the study of women within the field; the collection's timely publication—just two years after the symposium—means its contributors are usefully engaging recent historical treatments, as well as conducting important research of their own." McKee singled out that "particularly readable and intriguing for its use of oral histories, for instance, is coeditor Melissa Walker's ‘The Changing Character of Farm Life: Rural Southern Women.’" McKee observed, however, that some essayists in the collection "labor under the burden of treating such a broad range of women—black, white, working class, elite, antebellum, postbellum—from across the South that specific examples fail to mitigate their generalizing impulse." Writing in the Journal of Southern History, Anne Firor Scott noted that "readers' own interests will shape what they find here." Scott commended that "wisely, few of the essayists here make any but tentative forecasts of what might come next. In 1960 no one foresaw the outpouring on the subject, which has now gone on for more than forty years," adding, what happens next in the discipline "is anybody's guess."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Studies International, April, 1992, Jon L. Wakelyn, review of The Future South: A Historical Perspective for the Twenty-first Century, p. 119.

Historian, spring, 1992, Bruce J. Schulman, review of The Future South.

Journal of American History, December, 2004, Betty Brandon, review of Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective, p. 1114.

Journal of Southern History, November, 1992, Jeff Broadwater, review of The Future South, p. 769; February, 2006, Anne Firor Scott, review of Southern Women at the Millennium, p. 237.

Political Science Quarterly, summer, 2004, Rosalind Rosenberg, review of Southern Women at the Millennium.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1991, review of The Future South.

Women's Review of Books, October, 2004, Kathryn McKee, review of Southern Women at the Millennium, p. 10.

ONLINE

Converse College Web site,http://www.converse.edu/ (January 9, 2008), author profile.