Joan Bondurant

Joan Valerie Bondurant (1918–2006) was an American political scientist and former spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. She is best known as the author of Conquest of Violence: The Ghandian Philosophy of Conflict (1958), a book on Gandhian political philosophy.

Early life and intelligence work
Bondurant was born on 16 December 1918 in Great Bend, Kansas. She was gifted in the piano, and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in music.

When World War II broke out, she learned Japanese, and was sent to work for the OSS in India, arriving in New Delhi in May, 1944.

Scholarly career and later life
While in India, she met Mahatma Gandhi, and became interested in his nonviolent approach to politics. Returning to the US, Bondurant obtained a doctoral degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley (1952). She then published Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (1958), a widely reviewed and influential book on Gandhian politics.

Later, she took a job teaching at University of the Pacific.

Her collection of personal and research papers was given to the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation of River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester in 2012 and was opened to researchers in 2015.