American studies in Britain is at a crossroads. The history of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and the Journal of American Studies (JAS) has played out in what we might call the “age of public diplomacy.” This was a period stretching from the end of World War II to the beginning of the second presidential administration of Donald Trump. It was shaped by a bipartisan commitment to the strategy of, in the formative words of the political scientist Joseph S. Nye, “affecting others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment.”Footnote ¹

During this period, American soft power mattered. And whether we liked it or not, British Americanists were part of an ecosystem fundamentally shaped by that soft power. Even if individual academics disavowed direct receipt of funding from the State Department or the major American philanthropic foundations – and many did – when they spoke at BAAS conferences, published in JAS, or studied and were employed to teach about the United States at universities across Britain, they formed part of that ecosystem. Imagining a world of British American studies that operated independently of US soft power was, until recently, all but impossible.

And yet that world is now upon us. As part of its “America First” approach to foreign policy, the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from UNESCO, dismantled the Agency for International Development (USAID), massively reduced spending on democracy promotion and human rights initiatives, and scaled back staffing for bodies like the Agency for Global Media, causing it to wind down the Voice of America international broadcasting network which had been running continuously since 1942.Footnote ²

The end of public diplomacy has also altered the landscape in which British American studies operates. In January 2025, an executive order on “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” prompted the BAAS to close its US Embassy Small Grants Programme – the source of approximately $500,000 of funding for activity in American studies in the UK between 2017 and 2024 – based on the association’s commitment to “principles of equality, diversity and inclusion.”Footnote ³ Even if future Presidents recommit to public diplomacy and soft power, it seems unlikely that they will revert to investing the sums of money in the global scholarly networks that have shaped our field since the 1950s.

As area studies academics, this new situation must prompt a reconceptualization of our positionality, i.e. the core assumptions underpinning our relationship to the “area” of the world we study.Footnote ⁴ Done properly, this reconceptualization will be akin to those that took place in both Asian studies and Slavonic and East European studies at the end of the Cold War. Born of the imperatives of the national security state, these fields reconsidered both their origins and their futures against the backdrop of shifting geopolitical landscapes and intellectual priorities. In doing so, they generated energetic new perspectives born of what the preeminent US Asianist Bruce Cumings called the “boundary displacements” of the 1980s and 1990s, caused by the crumbling of the post-1945 world order and the rapid pace of globalization.Footnote ⁵

To start our own version of this process, we must turn to the early history of British American studies. Fresh consideration of the moment in which our field was founded will help us to see that while it has been consistently shaped (and possibly in certain contexts constrained) by US soft power, it has by no means been defined by it. This will, in turn, help us develop a new sense of positionality, one better suited to the current geopolitical moment, so clearly shaped as it is by the end of American public diplomacy.

Reflecting in his 1967 autobiography Making It on the development of the discipline of American studies, the New York intellectual and neoconservative critic Norman Podhoretz posed a series of characteristically bombastic questions:

Podhoretz’s views on the founding moment of American studies betray an obvious chauvinism. However, the significance of his ideas also lies in the way that they highlight two modes of thinking about the discipline’s emergence that have retained currency – albeit in more subtle forms – in subsequent discussions of the subject. First, Podhoretz suggested that American studies emerged “suddenly” during the early Cold War. Second, he linked its emergence to the political and economic power of the United States.

While both assumptions have some basis in truth, there are other ways of conceptualizing the history of the BAAS and American studies in Britain. In outlining some of these alternative conceptualizations, I want to place the development of the association against the backdrop of scholarship on the intellectual and cultural history of the Cold War that has reconsidered and decentred the importance of anticommunist politics in postwar intellectual and academic life. In doing so, we will arrive at a more complex portrait of the BAAS’s founding moment that helps cast light not only on the intellectual scene of the early Cold War, but also on the subsequent complexity of American studies in Britain.

Of course, studies of the United States by British observers and scholars had a rich pre-1945 tradition. From Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Harriet Martineau’s Society in America (1837), and Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842), through D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classical American Literature (1923) and D. W. Brogan’s The American Political System (1933), various British analysts of the American scene approached the subject from a variety of literary and scholarly perspectives.

Nonetheless, the emergence of a distinct academic discipline fusing analysis of US history, politics, literature, and culture is a more recent phenomenon. As the historian of Anglo-American relations David Reynolds has shown, there was a significant thrust amongst British academics and educators in the 1930s towards the establishment of formal study of the US in schools and universities. However, it was only with the onset of World War II that the British government began to take notice. In this context, the development of a wartime alliance between the so-called “English-speaking peoples” lent “new persuasiveness” to the argument for American studies. So began “an ambitious programme” drawing together the Board of Education, the Ministry of Information, the Foreign Office, and the BBC to promote the study of America across the British educational system. As Reynolds makes clear, the British had “discovered” the idea of sustained academic study of the United States by 1941 and had done so independently of the US State Department.Footnote ⁷

Even so, it would be churlish to try and explain the emergence of American studies as we know and practise it Britain today without the influence of US public diplomacy and soft power. BAAS was founded in 1955 at a conference dedicated to American studies that was funded by the US Education Commission and the Rockefeller Foundation. The event was part of a series known as the Fulbright Conferences because of the funding that flowed from the 1946 Fulbright Act, which aimed to support international exchange between the US and the rest of the world. Ambivalence about this link was clear, though, in the association’s decision to turn down a \$100,000 grant from the US embassy in 1956 because it did not want to appear to be involved in propaganda activity. Nonetheless, it became increasingly apparent that a scholarly organization devoted to actively and energetically pursuing the interests of American studies would need funding over and above that provided by paying members. This led in 1957 to the association agreeing to the terms of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that would provide it with \$150,000 over a five-year period.Footnote ⁸

Studies by Inderjeet Parmar and Ali Fisher have diligently traced the early organizational history of BAAS, placing it firmly against the backdrop of early Cold War world politics. But there is an illuminating disagreement in their interpretations. Parmar’s analysis is indebted to Gramscian theories of international relations, and makes the case that US philanthropic funding for the British American studies project was fundamentally tied up with “an elite state–private network that united key elements of a Cold War coalition … behind an imperial hegemonic project.”Footnote ⁹ In this reading, British American studies was unavoidably – if not always directly – complicit in the postwar project to contain the spread of communism.

Fisher’s analysis, on the other hand, suggests that the relationship between BAAS and the US state in the late 1950s was not only one of control and complicity. BAAS was never truly independent, he argues, but “representatives of American state and philanthropic foundations were mistaken in their belief that they could control British academics.”Footnote ¹⁰ This resulted in a situation whereby British Americanists ultimately made the discipline their own, lending credence to historian Richard Pells’s earlier suggestion that the US state “could not in the end determine what American Studies should be, or how it might be used, after it crossed the ocean.”Footnote ¹¹

More conventional accounts of Cold War intellectual history than Fisher’s structure their analysis by referring to the impact on American cultural life of international political concerns, the rise of domestic anticommunism, and a popular mind-set that prioritized political and cultural conformity.Footnote ¹² Historians have also paid significant attention to the rise of American attempts at cultural diplomacy, as well as the influence of geopolitical and strategic concerns on academic disciplines such as the physical and natural sciences and anthropology.Footnote ¹³ Accounts of the specific political functions of emerging disciplines such as area studies – and, more specifically, American studies – have therefore tended to align them with the prerogatives of the Cold War state’s aspiration to spread American influence abroad.

However, more recent discussions of Cold War intellectual history, and most specifically of the human and social sciences, have questioned these explanatory paradigms. Historians such as David Engerman, Joel Isaac, and Jamie Cohen-Cole, for example, have focussed on the complex interactions and negotiations between policy makers, scientists, and academics as they developed disciplines (such as sociology, psychology, Russian studies, and philosophy of science) that could not exist without participation and funding from a range of organizations and individuals, often with competing political and intellectual prerogatives.Footnote ¹⁴ This research has led diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson to argue that scholars should avoid stereotypes and clichés about what politics, society, and culture consisted of during the period: “the Cold War is not necessarily everything that happened in the Cold War,” he has suggested, and it should be remembered that “other histories and periodizations are, in principle, possible.”Footnote ¹⁵

If we take this historiographical injunction to heart, it is necessary to reconsider not only the organizational history of BAAS, as Fisher has done so thoroughly, but also the intellectual history of those participating in its project of promoting American studies in Britain in the early Cold War. For example, if we go back to the Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies, the forerunner to the Journal of American Studies, it is possible to see a surprising diversity of scholarly interests exposed within its pages. Louis Billington has demonstrated that, as well as serving as a newsletter for the association and a forum in which manuscript collections could be advertised, the bulletin published short articles summarizing innovative approaches being forged by British scholars.Footnote ¹⁶ These included a series of articles on the Cornish, Welsh, and Irish immigrant experiences in the US “from the bottom up,” reflections on British Confederate sympathizers, and summaries of pioneering transatlantic studies of American religion.Footnote ¹⁷ The inclusion of work by various US scholars is also notable, especially a 1959 essay by John Hope Franklin entitled “The Intercontinental Implications of American Negro History,” which argued for a geographical expansion of US historians’ source materials decades before Americanists of subsequent generations participated in what they called the “transnational turn.”Footnote ¹⁸

Another place we can sense the complexity of the intellectual world that informed early British American studies is in the autobiographical writing of those who participated in it. One example is that of Marcus Cunliffe, for much of his career an Americanist at the University of Manchester, as well as a key figure in the establishment of the BAAS, serving as its third chair from 1962 to 1965. Writing in 1980, Cunliffe made clear that his generation, many of whom, like him, had served in World War II, “took it as axiomatic that Britain, the Commonwealth, and Russia could not have won the war without the United States.” This meant that the politics of the early Cold War figured strongly in their scholarly approach: “We were predisposed to agree that the United States was different from, and in important respects better than Europe: exceptional, and exceptionally good.” Nonetheless, this did not stop Cunliffe expressing “reservations” about American exceptionalism.Footnote ¹⁹

Nor did it stop others from expressing scepticism towards the United States at the early gatherings that would lead to the foundation of BAAS. In the reminisces of the American literary critic Alfred Kazin, who was present at a meeting in Cambridge in 1952, many of the British scholars “looked on America with fascinated dislike.”Footnote ²⁰ This underscores Cunliffe’s argument that, for his generation, the United States figured as both “a great discovery” and “a great mistake,” and that they approached their scholarly endeavours neither as propagandists nor as dissidents.Footnote ²¹

These examples do not prove that British American studies as it was practised in its early years deviated in any significant way from the dominant “myth-and-symbol” method pioneered by Henry Nash Smith and others in the 1950s, and which entrenched in the field the exceptionalist view of American history, society, and culture that would only be overturned as the social upheavals of the 1960s worked their way through the academy.Footnote ²² But without a more searching and detailed account of the intellectual history of American studies in Britain, one that looks beyond the Cold War support provided to the BAAS by the US state and various philanthropic foundations, it will be impossible to know.Footnote ²³

Such an account of the field is even more necessary today. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and just as Americanists across the world were coming to terms with the complicity of their field in the project of Cold War soft power, Leo Marx wrote in American Quarterly about the “origin and character” of American studies. His article concluded,

In its moment, Marx’s call was an important one and suggested that scholars of American studies needed a better sense of the roots of their discipline in the history of the early Cold War and the age of public diplomacy.

But what is needed now is a revision of Marx’s moral: if we think about the story of American studies in Britain as, at least in part, a story of the relations between intellectuals and power, we might want to remind ourselves of the debilitating effect these relations can have not if they are “unexamined or denied,” but if they are allowed to stand in for the full story. We might therefore conclude, with a nod to Anders Stephanson, that the Cold War and the age of public diplomacy to which it gave rise are not everything that happened in the early years of British American studies. Other periodizations are, in principle, possible, and we would do well to bear this in mind.

This lesson is not only relevant to the history of British American studies, but also to its future. The age of public diplomacy was important to, but by no means determinative of, our field’s formation and development. And yet we too often fall back on assumptions that those who developed and grew British American studies in its early years were somehow part of a Cold War “racket,” to use Marcus Cunliffe’s term.Footnote ²⁵ As we consciously and confidently leave this framing behind, we should realize that, even as the field navigates into a new and perhaps uncertain future, we have opportunities to reset its coordinates, alter our sense of positionality, and chart the course for a new and inventive period ahead.