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 Lifetime Achievement Award of Peace History Society
Wendy Chmielewski
Awarded October 2019
In 2005, Peace History Society set up the Lifetime Achievement Award to be presented every other year to a PHS member who has contributed outstanding scholarship and exemplary service to peace history. The recipients of the award have been: Charles Chatfield (1934-2015) in 2007: Sandi Cooper in 2009: Lawrence Wittner in 2011; Berenice Carroll in 2013; Geoffrey S. Smith in 2015; and Harriet Hyman Alonso in 2017.
The Peace History Society is proud to award its 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding service to PHS and peace history to Dr. Wendy Chmielewski, the George Cooley Curator at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Wendy joins the ranks of previous award winners such as Harriet Hyman Alonso, Sandi Cooper, Charles Chatfield, Lawrence Wittner, Blanche Wiesen Cook and Geoff Smith. Dr. Chmielewski’s service to the Peace History Society and the field of peace history is extensive.
She has served the Peace History Society as President, Vice President, a member of the PHS Board, and on a number of award committees. She has also served on the Board of Editors for H-Peace and our journal Peace and Change.
Her scholarship is extensive. Her published works—too numerous to cite here—relate to women’s peace activism, political activity, and diplomacy from the 19th through the 21st centuries. She has presented her work at conferences in the United States, the UK, and Turkey. Her current projects include work on transatlantic peace efforts between British and American women in the mid-19th century, a monograph with Jill Norgren on women who campaigned for political office before they could vote, and finally, a digital database of the biographical records of nearly 4,000 US women who ran for public office before 1920. This last one, in particular, will be a crucial contribution to future generations of peace researchers.
Which brings me to her immeasurable contribution to peace research as Curator of the Swarthmore Peace Collection. Over the course of her career, Dr. Chmielewski has expanded and preserved the archive’s manuscript collections, won grants to digitize audio-visual recordings on women’s peace activism, the anti-nuclear movement, and the movement against the Vietnam War, and developed websites, databases, and an award-winning research guide. Many of us have spent lengthy amounts of time in the library’s basement going through boxes of papers and photos, making copies by the boatload, and meeting fellow researchers. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the field of Peace History would even exist without the work she has done to make material on the history of the peace movement accessible to scholars and students, and provide a welcoming place to conduct research and make connections with others in the field.
Please join me in extending our well-deserved congratulations to Dr. Chmielewski.
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