Laura Gifford
Scholar in Residence503-554-2678
lgifford@georgefox.edu
Laura Jane Gifford is scholar in residence in the George Fox University history department and has taught courses in the department since 2008. She earned a BA in history and political science at Pacific Lutheran University and an MA and Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Gifford's first book, The Center Cannot Hold: The 1960 Presidential Election and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, was published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2009. She is currently co-editing a volume of scholarship on conservatism in the 1960s tentatively titled, Decade of Transformation: Contesting the Future of Conservatism in the 1960s, with Daniel K. Williams of the University of West Georgia. To this, she has also co-edited a volume of scholarship on conservatism in the 1960s with Daniel K. Williams (University of West Georgia) titled, The Right Side of the Sixties: Reexamining Conservatism's Decade of Transformation. The volume is slated for release by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2012.
Gifford is currently undertaking an examination of former Oregon governor Tom McCall, other Republican Party liberals and the development of a progressive and in some cases cross-partisan "Third Force" movement in American politics in the early 1970s. She has also performed research into the activities and rhetoric of Dr. Fred Schwarz and his Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, a putatively right-wing organization that in fact combined conservative anticommunist appeals with a broad understanding of the Cold War as an international struggle.