The Centre draws on expertise from University of Nottingham faculty in the Departments of American and Canadian Studies, History, and Geography, and is open to members from across the University.
Stephanie Lewthwaite
Associate Professor in American History
I am an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in US Latinx history and culture with a specific focus on the role of place, race, and memory in borderland spaces and contemporary visual culture. My book projects have examined the impact of social reform programmes on Mexican migrants in Los Angeles during the Progressive and New Deal periods, and the role of modernist cultures in shaping Hispano art in New Mexico during the early twentieth century. My current projects focus on contemporary Chicanx visual culture in the US-Mexico borderlands and relational memory in Caribbean Latinx art in New York City since the 1970s. I have a growing interest in the relationship between art, ecology and interspecies kinship.
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Bevan Sewell
Associate Professor in American History
I am a historian of U.S. history, with a particular focus on U.S. foreign relations during the twentieth century, and the domestic, cultural, transnational and global interconnections that have influenced the American role in the world. In my first project, I examined the evolution of U.S. policy in Latin American during the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies, and in my current work, I am researching the approach of former secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, toward the problem of worldmaking in the first half of the twentieth century. Future work will examine the relationship between rights, neoliberalism, and inequality in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
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Joe Merton
Lecturer in Twentieth Century History
I am a historian of the post-1945 United States, with particular research interests in race and ethnicity, crime and urban politics, conservatism and the Right, and the history of New York City. My first research project addressed the changing politics of white, European ethnicity during the 1970s, and its impact on presidential politics and policymaking during this time. My current research focuses on the politics of crime in 1970s New York, and argues that anxieties over predatory crime were at least as significant as the concurrent fiscal crisis in reshaping New Yorkers’ attitudes towards government and the market, citizenship, urban space and design, and urban governance.
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Maria Ryan
Associate Professor in American History
I am a historian of the contemporary United States. My research is on post-Cold War US foreign policy. I am particularly interested in the ‘war on terror’, global grand strategy, globalization and American power, and the history of the US intelligence community. My first book, Neoconservatism and the New American Century, examined the political and intellectual origins of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. My second, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and titled Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror, examined the smaller fronts of the ‘war on terror’ in the Philippines, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Georgia and the development of the US capacity to conduct irregular warfare. My current project, funded by the British Academy, looks at the US-China ‘tech war’ and the attempt to achieve a ‘targeted decoupling’ from China in advanced dual-use technologies.
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Jake Hodder
Associate Professor of Geography
I am a historical and political geographer of the United States, with a particular focus on internationalism and the African American experience. My previous projects have examined the global work of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the interwar Pan-African Congress movement, led by W. E. B. Du Bois. My current project, funded by a British Academy and Wolfson Foundation fellowship, focuses on the relationship between African Americans and the League of Nations. It explores how early global governance offered new spaces and vocabularies to challenge domestic racial inequality, despite U.S. non-membership.
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