Marjorie Mowlam, who received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Iowa in 1977, died at Pilgrim's Hospice in the United Kingdom on August 19^th at age 55 from the recurrence of a brain tumor that had been first diagnosed nine years earlier. In the interval between that diagnosis and her death, she rose to become Britain's most popular politician on the strength of her accomplishment as secretary of state for Northern Ireland in negotiating the Good Friday Accords in 1998. When she subsequently fell from Tony Blair's good graces and was sidelined to the Cabinet Office, her personal popularity only rose further. To Blair's embarrassment, she received a standing ovation at the Labour Party Conference in 1998 in the middle of the prime minister's report to the delegates.

Mo, as she liked to be called, came to the University of Iowa after receiving a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Durham in the U.K. Her Ph.D. dissertation, on the effect of the referendum on Swiss politics, was a highly creditable piece of research but it hardly presaged her distinguished political career. A recommendation sent by one of her professors at Durham as part of her Iowa application was more prophetic. He wrote that “she had a particular talent for bridge-building between groups … and there can be no doubt that she contributed a great deal to the general peace and goodwill that prevailed throughout the University [of Durham] during her period [there].”

She was an iconoclast, breaking conventions and challenging orthodoxies, but doing it in such a candid, good humored way that she rarely gave anyone offense. Mo was a lively, enthusiastic, enterprising, and conscientious student who went on to an academic career first at Florida State University and then at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. But Labour Party politics was her first love and when she was given a chance to campaign for the House of Commons in 1987 she could not resist. Her meteoric rise in parliament followed. She became Labour Party spokeswoman for Northern Ireland during her first term, was elected to the Shadow Cabinet in her second, and was appointed to the Cabinet in her third.

Mo returned to the University of Iowa in 1998 to accept its Distinguished Alumni Award and on that occasion gave a talk entitled “People Matter.” She tried to relate some general lessons she had learned in political science to the process of negotiation that led to the Good Friday Accords. In a tribute to the many individuals who contributed to those accords, she ended with a quote from Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” In politics as in her personal life, she was a woman of remarkable courage.