Biography
Dr. Lisa Payne Ossian is emerita professor of history at Des Moines Area Community College. Her research and publications have focused on the Second World War as well as on rural Iowa during the early years of the Great Depression, with a new research project focusing on the Mississippi River.
Ossian has presented at well over a hundred regional, national, and international academic conferences. She has edited a book concerning American women’s war writings, wrote an essay on bi-partisan presidential friendship (Lexington Press) and another on Maurice Pate’s reports leading to the founding of UNICEF (Bloomsbury Press), and published three books with the University of Missouri Press including The Forgotten Generation: American Children and World War II.
She has received research grants from Stanford University, the Truman Presidential Library, the FDR Library, and the Hoover Presidential Foundation. She completed an extensive manuscript titled “The Grimmest Spectre”: Herbert Hoover’s Global Famine Mission & the Founding of UNICEF (pending approval with Yale University Press London) and finished Waifs of Warsaw: Polish Girlhood & Motherless Memories during the Second World War, 1939–1946. She is under contract with Bloomsbury Press in 2026 for The Hoover Plan: Moral & Spiritual Reconstruction, 1947.