Dr Diana Lemberg

Dr Diana Lemberg

Lecturer in the History of the United States (post 1850)

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2922
Email
dll4@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

I'm a historian of the United States in the world in the twentieth century who is broadly interested in the connections between power and paradigms, and how American power, specifically, has shaped the uptake of American practices and technologies outside U.S. borders.

My forthcoming book, The Weapon of Words: Language Training in the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2027), focuses on U.S. investments in language education since World War II. As it entered new arenas of conflict and cultural exchange in the 1940s, Washington began encouraging Americans and others to learn languages, hoping to render the world legible to its strategists. From San Francisco to Saigon, it subsidized new institutions, funding streams, and pedagogies. Yet as teachers and students at home and abroad were drawn into U.S. foreign policy, they voiced rationales for language learning that diverged from U.S. defense priorities. The book will expand our understanding of an issue central to humanists, albeit one that has been understudied by U.S. historians: how changing American conceptions of language learning have shaped U.S. diplomatic and cultural relations with the world.

My first book, Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019) traces how the United States shaped media around the world after 1945 under the banner of the “free flow of information,” showing how the push for global media access acted as a vehicle for American power.

My work has been supported by fellowships and grants in the United States, Europe, and Asia. During the 2024-25 academic year I was a fellow of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (for "The Weapon of Words"). From April-July 2024, I was an invited resident fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University, as part of the group project "Understanding the Transformations of World Politics: Ordering Principles and Infrastructures of Communication."

Before coming to St Andrews I was associate professor of history at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. I received my PhD from Yale University in 2014 and my BA (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Princeton University in 2005.

PhD supervision

  • Charlotte Disley

Selected publications

 

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