Jenifer Van Vleck
Assistant Professor
Office: HGS 209
Phone: (203) 432-1393
Email: jenifer.vanvleck@yale.edu
Jenifer Van Vleck’s teaching and research focus on the United States and the world, cultural history, and the history of business and technology. Her forthcoming book, No Distant Places: Aviation and the Global American Century (Harvard University Press), argues that aviation, and ideas about aviation, were instrumental in facilitating the United States’ rise to global hegemony during the mid-twentieth century. Van Vleck’s other publications include “The Logic of the Air: Aviation and the Globalism of the ‘American Century,’” New Global Studies 1.1 (Fall 2007) and “An Airline at the Crossroads of the World: Ariana Afghan Airlines, Modernization, and the Global Cold War,” History and Technology 25:1 (March 2009). Her new book project, Ambassadors with Bulldozers: Morrison Knudsen and the Engineering of American Global Power, is a transnational history of modernization and development, engineering, and environmental transformation.
Van Vleck received her Ph.D. from Yale in 2009. Her awards and fellowships include the Theron Rockwell Field Prize, the Edwin W. Small Prize, the AHA/NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History, the Daniel P. Guggenheim Fellowship (Smithsonian Institution), and the John Morton Blum Fellowship for Graduate Research in American History and Culture.
