Description:

The Iron Curtain and the “Language Curtain”:
Foreign Languages and the National Interest during the Cold War

This lecture examines how the politics and activism of scholars in the field of foreign languages and literatures were intertwined with and often funded by official Cold War policies and priorities. During this period, academics transformed the Modern Language Association from a stodgy scholarly organization into a formidable public advocate of foreign language education in order to further official goals of fostering the ability to communicate with and gather expertise on international “Others.” The lecture traces the convergence of scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional priorities with U.S. foreign policy goals, and demonstrates how the field functioned as a vehicle for soft power from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Deborah Cohn is Professor of Spanish at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of 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), as well as coeditor of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004). Her essays and articles have appeared in journals including Diplomatic History, Latin American Research Review, Global South, CR: The New Centennial Review, and American Literature.

Lunch Served

Co-sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the American Cultures Colloquium, the Program in American Studies, the Department of Spanish & Portugese