Professor Deborah Cohn
Nominated Fellow, May 2026
Deborah Cohn is Provost Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of two books: The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (2012) and History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (1999). She is also co-editor of two more: International Education at the Crossroads (with Hilary Kahn; 2021) and Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies (with Jon Smith; 2004). She has authored articles on a wide range of topics, including the history of language education in the U.S.; Latin American literature and U.S. cultural diplomacy; the use of American studies as a mode of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War; and many different aspects of William Faulkner’s work and travels. Her research on language education has been cited in Times Higher Education, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
Project title: American Studies and the U.S. Bicentennial: Cultural Diplomacy for a Nation (and Field) in Flux
In 1975 and 1976, a series of five international conferences marking the U.S. Bicentennial was held in Austria, Japan, Iran, the U.S., and the Ivory Coast. The conferences, which were co-organized by the Bicentennial Committee for International Conferences of Americanists, the (U.S.) American Studies Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Information Agency, and the U.S. Department of State, were meant to both assess the global impact of the U.S. and the American Revolution and to strengthen the activity of American studies scholars around the world. At the same time, the conferences provided an opportunity to further the longstanding practice of using the field of American studies as a mode of cultural diplomacy by showcasing the nation’s accomplishments and impact on the world at a time when fallout from Watergate and the Vietnam War made U.S. government officials eager to retake control of the narrative about the U.S. My project, which is the final chapter of my current book project, American Studies Abroad during the Cold War: From Cultural Diplomacy to Cultural Imperialism, thus examines both the planning of the conferences and how they functioned as vehicles for U.S. public diplomacy at a time when both American studies and relations between scholars and the State in the U.S. were in flux. It unpacks the political maneuvering behind the conferences, as well as the tensions between official U.S. interests, the U.S.-based scholars who organized the conferences, and local hosts and participants. It also examines the agency of international participants in setting agendas for the events that reflected a broad range of local interests, such as a desire to strengthen ties with the U.S. and suspicions that the field was being used to advance U.S. propaganda and imperialist designs.