Dr. Nicholas Cull
Professor of Communications
University of Southern California
Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and Director of the Masters Program in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. He has published numerous articles on the theme of propaganda and media history. He is President of the International Association for Media and History, a member of the Public Diplomacy Council and has worked closely with the British Council's Counterpoint Think Tank.
From 1992 to 1997 he was lecturer in American History at the University of Birmingham. From September 1997 to August 2005 he was Professor of American Studies and Director of the Centre for American Studies in the Department of History at Leicester.
His research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary, but much of his work has focused on the role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He contributed the chapter “The Public Diplomacy of the Modern Olympic Games and China’s Soft Power Strategy” to Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China (2008). He is also the author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (2008). His first book, Selling War, was a study of British information work in the United States before Pearl Harbor, and was named by Choice Magazine as one of the ten best academic books of 1995. He is the co-editor (with David Culbert and David Welch) of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500-present, which was one of Booklist magazine's reference books of 2003.
He graduated with a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Leeds. While a graduate student he studied at Princeton University as a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York.