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.
Centre steering group Associate members of the Centre
Centre steering group
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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Associate members
Elle Griffiths
Elle Griffiths is an early career researcher with particular interests in activist cultures, social class, the contemporary Left and the effects of various media amplified culture wars in the United States. Her PhD focussed on the Appalachian region, which she remains endlessly enamoured and fascinated with. She has been a fellow at The Smithsonian in Washington D.C, received funding from the AHRC to complete several research trips to Appalachia and elsewhere and continues to work as a freelance journalist. More recently she is interested in the intersections of Green politics and class in the US and is looking to elevate overlooked histories of working class environmentalism at the sites of extractive capitalism.
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Anna Primrose Orchard
Anna-Primrose Orchard is a PhD candidate in American Studies and History and has a keen interest in material culture and consumption during the twentieth century. Her current thesis assesses whether material culture and acts of consumption during the Vietnam War played a pivotal role in GIs’ understanding of their identity, masculinity and military service. The project unpicks the monolithic image of GIs, exhibiting how race, ethnicity and class influenced perceptions of personal identity, empire and the U.S. role in the world. It contributes to Cold War and Vietnam War historiography by detailing the intersections between military service, camp life and consumerism, providing new insights into soldier’s renegotiation of their masculinity and identity through material objects.
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Alex Riggs
Alex Riggs is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American History and Culture in the Department of English, American Studies and New Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He completed his PhD in History at the University of Nottingham in 2024, funded by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. His thesis, ‘Creating a Rainbow: Ideas and Coalition Building on the American Left, c. 1973-1988’, analysed the development of ‘rainbow coalition’ politics as a lodestar for activists on the left of the Democratic Party, as they sought to unite ‘old left’ trade union groups with ‘new left’ campaigners for social equality in the aftermath of the conflicts of the 1968 and 1972 elections. His research thus highlights the origins of the intellectual outlook of the contemporary left, and frames the history of the American left in the late twentieth century as one of more than simple decline in the face of ascendent conservatism.
His research has been published in the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, US Studies Online, and Midlands Historical Review. His work on the Harold Washington administration in Chicago will be featured in a chapter in Beyond Consensus: New Histories of American Liberalism, 1968-2000, edited by Dan Geary and Joe Ryan-Hume, and formed part of a forum on the mayor’s legacy hosted by Chicago Public Library. In future, Alex intends to use his PhD as the basis of a book on rainbow coalition politics, and to pursue a new research project on the evolution of American activism against globalisation in the late twentieth century.
Email: alex.riggs@manchester.ac.uk; adriggs31@gmail.com