As we approach our 40th anniversary in 2027, we are excited to share that the Roth Foundation has been growing a lot, in terms of both our programs and our board. We thought it might be interesting for you to “meet” the board members who make it all happen. So, welcome to our fifth Board Member Spotlight, on Deborah Cohn, Provost Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington.
My research focuses on cultural diplomacy, language education, and the Cold War use of university disciplines as modes of conducting cultural diplomacy for the U.S. My current focus is on how the development of American Studies as a field was meant to promote both knowledge about the U.S. and its accomplishments at a time when a common communist critique was that the U.S. was materialistic and had no cultural accomplishments. American Studies became a way to teach about democracy and its benefits, then, as well as about what the United States had achieved.
My parents were diplomats (my father worked for USAID and my mother was in the State Department). I never planned to study diplomacy, but my interests seem to have had a different idea. I had written about the effects of Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner’s novels on Spanish American authors, when I became intrigued by how Faulkner himself had been a Cold War cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department. This led me both to examine cultural diplomacy within the context of US-Spanish American relations during the Cold War and to turn my lens towards the role of the US university in US foreign policy and diplomacy. This has taken my research in very different directions from what I ever predicted, but it has been very meaningful—and, also, was how I got involved with the Lois Roth Foundation.
I worked with Dick Arndt’s book, The First Resort of Kings, and I became interested in speaking with him about his work as a Cultural Affairs Officer, especially surrounding American Studies. I was very fortunate to meet with him and Foundation Chair Sky Arndt-Briggs a couple of years ago. At the time, Sky shared that she was putting together a publication prize in Dick’s honor and asked if I would be willing to work on the project as a way to honor him and his work. This undertaking spoke to both my academic and personal interests, and I became the Board Lead for the Dick Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy, which the Roth Foundation organizes in collaboration with PDCA (the Public Diplomacy Council of America). We were thrilled by the response to the inaugural edition of the prize in 2025, and look forward to hosting lectures by the three authors of the winning works in 2027.
Right now is a moment when the value of cultural diplomacy is being sidelined in the U.S., and that is a tremendous mistake. Cultural diplomacy provides an important means of reaching people, telling people about us, and cultivating goodwill. It comes with its challenges, of course, but the emphasis on hard power is overshadowing the value and importance of soft power. In addition to the terrific work that the foundation already does, we must now also focus attention on the value of cultural and public diplomacy itself.
