Mary Elizabeth King

(OWU '62)

Prize-winning author and political scientist Dr. Mary E. King is Professor of Peace Conflict Studies, University for Peace of the United Nations, Costa Rica. She is also Distinguished Scholar with The American University Center for Global Peace in Washington, D.C.  In 2004, she will also be Visiting Research Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, England.

Dr. King has been a practitioner of international relations for twenty-five years – requiring personal contact with heads of state and government ministers of more than 100 developing countries.  As a presidential appointee in the Carter Administration, confirmed by the Senate, Dr. King had world-wide responsibility for the Peace Corps (then in 60 countries), VISTA, and other national volunteer service corps programs. 

Since 1984, she has served as a special adviser on the Middle East to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.  As a young student, she worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation) in the U.S. civil rights movement.  Her book on that experience, Freedom Song:  A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, won her a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award in 1988.  A second edition of her latest book, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Power of Nonviolent Action, concerning nine contemporary nonviolent struggles and originally published by UNESCO in 1999, was brought out in India in 2002. 

The American historian Ruth Rosen in The World Split Open: How the Women’s Movement Changed America calls Mary King a central figure in starting the U.S. women’s movement. 

Dr. King is an adviser appointed by the government of India.  Her doctorate in international politics is from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth.