S4E06 Sarah Myers - Messiah University

Our guest today is Sarah Parry Myers, author of the new book Earning Their Wings: The WASPS of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition (UNC Press). Sarah is an Associate Professor of History at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She joined the faculty at Messiah after spending three years at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, where she also served as the director of the Keirn Family World War II Museum. She received her BA in History Education at the University of Missouri-Rolla and an MA in History at Missouri State. Sarah completed her PhD at Texas Tech University.

A specialist in gender and the military, Sarah is the author of “‘The Women Behind the Men Behind the Gun’: Gendered Identities and Militarization in the Second World War” in The Routledge Handbook of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, ed. Kara Dixon Vuic (Routledge) and “Battling Contested Air Spaces: The American Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II,” in Gender and the Second World War: The Lessons of War, edited by Corinna Peniston-Bird and Emma Vickers (Palgrave). Her first book, Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition was published in Sept. 2023 with UNC Press.

In 2020, Sarah was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War Grant for her project “We are Veterans Too: Women’s Experiences in the U.S. Military.” She is active in the Society for Military History, the American Historical Association, and The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, among other professional associations.

Join us for a delightful chat with the delightful Sarah Myers. We'll talk WASPs, financial exigency in higher ed, growing up in Missouri, being a Swiftie, not taking a class from Friend of the Pod John McManus, and yes, washing feet!

Shoutout to Borough BBQ in Gettysburg!

Rec.: 09/15/2023