Join us for Cultural & Public Diplomacy in a Changing World with Nicholas J Cull (University of Southern California) and Pete Millwood (University of Melbourne)
WHEN: August 19, 2026 at 5:00 pm
WHERE: GW Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 505, 1957 E St. NW, Washington, DC
Register HERE to Livestream
This event recognizes the work of the two recipients of the inaugural 2025 Richard T. Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy, awarded by The Lois Roth Foundation and the Public Diplomacy Council of America (PDCA). Each author will present his prize-winning work, and the following discussion will be moderated by prize jury co-chair Professor Deborah Cohn.
Nicholas J. Cull (USC) will present his winning work, Reputational Security: Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World (2024, Polity Press). A theoretical rethinking of the relationship between realpolitik and “soft power,” supported by an array of historical and current examples, this book argues that national reputation is fundamental to national wellbeing and security, particularly in the context of today’s radically different media and communications environment.
Cull’s main research areas are history, popular culture, and public diplomacy. He began his teaching career in the UK, where he founded the Center on American Studies at the University of Leicester in 1997. At USC since 2005, he was the founding director of the USC-Annenberg School’s master’s program in public diplomacy. He served as president of the International Association for Media and History (2004-2019). Reputational Security is the most recent of his many publications on a wide array of topics.
Pete Millwood (U Melbourne) will present his book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations (2022, Cambridge Univ. Press). This transnational history of Sino-American relations convincingly documents and argues that cultural diplomacy was far more responsible for bilateral policy changes of the 1970s than hitherto suspected. Using innovative methodology, it features oral history interviews and materials from more than a dozen archives in the U.S. and China.
Millwood is a historian of the Chinese world’s international and transnational relations. The research for his DPhil at St Antony’s College, Oxford, was supported by fellowships at Peking University and the Library of Congress. His writing and research have been published in leading historical journals and print and radio outlets. Improbable Diplomats is his first book; he is currently working on a global history of Taiwan’s democratization, supported by an ARC DECRA fellowship.
Facilitator Deborah Cohn is Provost Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of many journal articles and several books, including The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War. She is the Roth Foundation board lead for the Dick Arndt Prize and co-chaired the 2025 jury with Pauline Yang (US Arts Envoy, pianist, and PDCA member).
This event is co-sponsored by the GW Elliott School of International Affairs, the GW Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC), the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP), and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD). The biennial Richard T. Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy is co-sponsored by the Lois Roth Foundation and the Public Diplomacy Council of America.
