We are a vibrant centre for promoting and disseminating world-leading research into the life and culture of the United States and beyond.
Powerfully underpinned by a tradition of, and commitment to, interdisciplinary research, our areas of expertise range from the Revolutionary period to the present day. We encompass literature and drama, history, politics, and foreign relations. Staff specialisms include American urban history, the international history of the Cold War, civil rights, ecocriticism, American popular culture, comics and graphic novels, and contemporary multi-ethnic American literature and film.
Our research strategy is driven by a desire to enhance understandings of human cultures and communities, their linguistic, historic and literary transformations, and by the questions of power and identity that issue from such investigations.
The research we undertake has demonstrated significant impact, benefiting a wide variety of groups from practitioners and professionals (film-makers, interpreters, lawyers, police, and teachers), to communities facing particular intercultural challenges (whether Native communities or immigrants to Norfolk), and the general public (from local children to visitors to special events).
Recent books and research projects by our faculty members include:
In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world.
This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.
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