Dr. Alvah was born in Torrance, in Southern California, and spent the first years of her childhood in a small city called Lomita.  She has also lived in Virginia, Okinawa, San Jose (Northern California), and El Toro, now known as Lake Forest (Southern California).

She received bachelor’s degrees in history and humanities/women’s studies at the University of California, Irvine, then attended graduate school at the University of California, Davis, where she earned her master’s degree and doctorate in U.S. history, with a minor field in cross-cultural women’s history.  She is particularly interested in the interconnections among cultural history, social history, and foreign relations.  Courses she teaches include the survey of U.S. history since 1877, history of U.S. foreign relations, seminars on the United States in World War II and in the Vietnam War, and a pro-seminar titled "Americans in the World."  She and Dr. Karen Johnson in the Physics Department co-teach a course titled "The Nuclear World," which examines the history and science of the development of nuclear weapons, and the problems and controversies that emerged from this.

Dr. Alvah is on the advisory board for St. Lawrence University's new program in Peace Studies, and plans to teach an introductory course for the minor in Fall 2010.  Between 2009 and 2011, she will teach in SLU's First-Year Program.

New York University Press published Dr. Alvah's book Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965 in April 2007.  Additionally, she has written chapters on U.S. military wives and families for various edited collections: Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire (Duke, forthcoming in 2009); Women and the Military (Brill, forthcoming in 2010); and GIs in Germany: The American Military Presence 1945-2000 (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).  Other publications include entries for Encyclopedia of the Cold War: A Political, Social, and Military History; Americans at War: Society, Culture and the Homefront, and Dictionary of American History.

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