Department of History

Personal Statement:

I am a PhD candidate working with Dr. Salim Yaqub on 20th century U.S. Foreign Relations. I am particularly interested in examining the intersections between foreign policy and popular culture during the World War II and Cold War eras. My work also incorporates themes of race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality. 

My dissertation, tentatively titled “Blowin’ in the Wind: Media, Counterculture, and the American Military in Vietnam,” examines and analyzes the intersections of foreign policy and popular culture by situating the experiences of American soldiers during the Vietnam War alongside the Antiwar, Women’s Rights, Chicano, Asian American, and Black Power countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It explores the various mediums through which the counterculture reached men and women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds serving in Vietnam, and how these movements influenced both soldiers’ attitudes towards the war and their postwar re-assimilation into American society.

Previous projects have explored similar themes. In “Grunt Free Press: The Vietnam War and America’s ‘Crisis of Masculinity,'” I explore the experiences of American soldiers in the Vietnam War through the lens of an underground magazine, Grunt Free Press. The magazine, which circulated between 1968 and 1972, was written and published by American soldiers, for American soldiers. Within the pages of Grunt Free Press, soldiers wrestled with conflicting stereotypes of Asian women, interracial relationships between Vietnamese women and American soldiers, their responsibilities to Amerasian children, and stateside countercultural movements. Among these countercultural movements were the burgeoning feminist movement and antiwar movement, both of which represented a challenge to traditional notions of masculinity. By examining the attitudes of Grunt Free Press towards each of these topics, the paper seeks to understand how American men’s conceptions of masculinity evolved over the course of the war.

I am a founder of the Cold War Working Group. Check out our website here, or contact me if you’re interested in participating in a graduate student workshop (for papers or dissertation chapter works-in-progress), submitting a paper for our undergraduate blog (“This Day in Cold War History”), or visiting with UCSB graduate students to talk about your post-grad career! I can be reached at addisonmjensen@ucsb.edu.  

Courses Taught:

Instructor of Record

Summer 2021: History 171D, The United States and the World Since 1945, Session B. 

Summer 2021: Summer Research Academies (SRA), Track 2, “Hindsight’s 2020: Exploring the Tumultuous Year That Changed the World,” Session A.  

Teaching Assistant 

2021-2022 academic year: Writing 2 (Primary Instructor)

2019-2020 academic year: Lead Teaching Assistant 

Spring 2019: History 17C (Yaqub)

Winter 2019: History 17B (Stephens)

Fall 2018: History 17A (Maar)

Spring 2018: History 17C (Kalman)

Winter 2018: History 17B (Perrone)

Fall 2017: History 17A (Maar)

Spring 2017: History 17C (Yaqub)

Winter 2017: History 17B (Jacobson)

Fall 2016: History 17A (Warkentin)

Awards & Professional Activities: