Vivien Sandlund is a professor of American history and director of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) program. She teaches courses in slavery and abolition, African-American history, women in American history, American environmental history, 1960s America, the history of the Supreme Court, and other courses in modern U.S. history. She is a past president of the Ohio Academy of History.

Sandlund helped to found the MAIS program, and she is committed to interdisciplinary research and teaching and to the success of Hiram’s graduate students. She has directed the MAIS program for the past decade.

She worked previously as a television news reporter and as an environmental researcher for the EPA.

Education

• Ph.D, American History, Emory University
• M.A., American history, University of Massachusetts
• M.Ed., University of Massachusetts
• B.A., Political Science, University of Massachusetts

Research Interests

• Slavery and abolition in the 19th-century United States, with a focus on the movement for gradual slave emancipation.

Selected Publications

• “Robert Breckinridge, Presbyterian Antislavery Conservative.” Journal of Presbyterian History.
• “‘A Devilish and Unnatural Usurpation’: Baptist Evangelical Ministers and Antislavery in the Early Nineteenth Century — A Study of the Ideas and Activism of David Barrow.” American Baptist Quarterly.
• “Gender and Political Activism, 1878-1912.” Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History.
• Review of Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). HSHEAR, H-NET, Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
• Review of Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London and New York: 1994). Review published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

Fun Facts

• She is active as the social justice coordinator at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent, Ohio.
• She is also a committed animal rescuer.
• Sandlund has a daughter whom she adopted from Guatemala.

Additional Links