Rosemary Mariner, a resident scholar in the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Tennessee, passed away on January 24, 2019. She was 65 years old.
Mariner was the among the first women to earn Naval aviator wings in 1974, the first woman to fly a tactical fighter jet in 1975, and the first woman to command an aviation squadron in 1991. Her final military assignment was as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Professor of Military Studies at the National War College.
Mariner served as a lecturer in the University of Tennessee’s Department of History from 2002 to 2016. Throughout her academic career, she focused her research on evolving U.S. military traditions, connections between republican citizenship and military service, citizen armies, and the nexus between homeland security and civil-military relations. She was an expert on gender integration in the armed forces and worked as a consultant for ABC News and as a commentator for National Public Radio. Additionally, she edited with fellow University of Tennessee faculty member G. Kurt Piehler the book The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives (University of Tennessee Press, 2009).
Mariner graduated from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the age of 19 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics.