Denise Lynn is Professor and Chair of History, Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana. She is the editor of the journal American Communist History. She completed her Ph.D. at Binghamton University, State University of New York in 2006. She serves as the Vice-President of the Historians of American Communism. She wrote a regular blog for Black Perspectives, a publication of the African American Intellectual History Society. Her research focuses on gender and race in the American Communist Party. To contact Dr. Lynn click here.
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Selected Publications:
2022 Lynn, D. “Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and the Liberatory Potential of Peace,” In Battle for Peace special issue, American Communist History, Denise Lynn and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, editors, Vol. 21, 3-4 (2022): 187-199. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2022.2125251
2022 Lynn, D. ‘Gender violence as genocide: the Rosa Lee Ingram case and We Charge Genocide petition’. Radical Americas 7, 1 (2022): 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2022.v7.1.001
2021 Lynn, D., “Women Crusade for Peace: Claudia Jones and the Cold War Peace Movement,” Journal of Intersectionality, Vol. 3, No. 1, (Summer 2019): 67-80.
2021 Lynn, D. “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, 2021.
2020 Lynn, D. “Day of Reckoning: Anti-Communist Fantasies in the Carlo Tresca Assassination and Juliet Stuart Poyntz Disappearance,” American Communist History (2020): 1-14.
2020 Lynn, D. “Enlightening the Working Class: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Jefferson School of Social Science,” in Socialism and Democracy in W.E.B. DuBois’s Life, Thought, and Legacy, edited by Edward Carson, Gerald Horne, and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, London: Routledge, 2020. (reprint)
2019 Lynn, D., Adam, A, and Sakina Hughes, “Race and Racism in the Historical Imagination: Slavery and Civil Rights in Popular Culture,” Midwest Social Sciences Journal, Vol. 22, (2019): 85-100.
2018 Lynn, D. “Reproductive Sovereignty in Soviet and American Socialism During the Great Depression,” American Communist History Vol. 17, I (September 2018): 1-13.
Selected Blogs
2025 Lynn, D. “Taking their Passports Away Only Makes Activists More Determined,” October, Time, Made by History
2025 Lynn, D. “The Paradox of Anti-Communism,” September, Portside
2024 Lynn, D. “White Women and Reactionary Politics,” November, Black Perspectives, 2024
2022 Lynn, D. “Charlotta Bass and the Cold War Peace Movement,” Black Perspectives, March 2022 (Invited)
2022 Lynn, D. “Black Internationalism is the Antidote to America’s Love of war,” Washington Post, February 15, 2022
2021 Lynn, D. “When it comes to activism, Law Enforcement has always had a double standard,” Washington Post, November 17, 2021
2021 Lynn, D. “Water’s Ways in New Harmony,” Indiana Humanities Project, October 4, 2021
2021 Lynn, D. “FBI Harassment of Black Families,” Black Perspectives, November 2021
2020 Lynn, D. “Deporting Black Radicalism: Claudia Jones Deportation and Policing Blackness in the Cold War,” Lawrence & Wishart, March 2020
2019 Lynn, D. “FBI Files and Historical Practice,” Nursing Clio Blog, November 2019
2019 Lynn, D. “DuBois and the Jefferson School of Social Science,” Marxist Sociology Blog, October 2019
2019 Lynn, D. “The Disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poyntz,” Laura Ansley, ed., Killing Clio Series, Nursing Clio, June 2019.
Selected Black Perspectives Blogs
2021 Lynn, D. “Louise Thompson and the Black and White Film,” April 2021
2021 Lynn, D. “Law Enforcements Double Standard for Black Radical Activists,” February 2021
2020 Lynn, D. “Silencing Black Radicalism since the Cold War,” December 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Black Radical Activists and the Dangers of the Police State,” October 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Claudia Jones and the Price of Anticommunism,” September 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Surveillance, State Power; and the Activism of Shirley Graham DuBois,” September 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Radical Abner Berry and the Limitations of Liberal Alliances,” July 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Losing Willie McGee,” July 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Denying the Franchise as Incitement to Genocide,” June 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Confronting Reactionaries: Black Support for the Progressive Party During the Cold War,” May 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Campus Activism and Free Speech at Syracuse University,” March 2020
2020 Lynn, D. “Charlotta Bass for Vice-President: America’s Two-Parties and the Black Vote,” January 2020
In the News
Denise Lynn, Ph.D. 