The Lois Roth Foundation for cross-cultural dialogue and the Public Diplomacy Council of America (PDCA) announce six works that have been shortlisted for the inaugural Richard T. Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy. This biennial award recognizes recent English-language publications and productions that explore the international history of cultural diplomacy. The five-person jury was made up of members of PDCA and the Roth Foundation’s board of directors and co-chaired by Dr. Deborah Cohn (Provost Professor, IU Bloomington) and U.S. Arts Envoy Pauline Yang.

The jurors first wish to acknowledge the great interest and high quality of all twenty-one submissions. We learned a lot and are very grateful to have been exposed to the very different approaches to new information and ideas represented in both accounts of little-known but fascinating cases of cultural diplomacy in action, and insightful treatments of the role and functioning of public and cultural diplomacy writ large.

The jury has short-listed six works to be considered further for the prize. Our congratulations to the following works and authors, in alphabetical order:

Nicholas Cull: Reputational Security: Refocusing Public Diplomacy for a Dangerous World (book, Polity Press 2024)

Jennifer Lin: Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China (book and documentary, Temple University Press 2022)

Maximilian Klose: Why They Gave: CARE and American Aid for Germany after 1945 (book, Franz Steiner Verlag 2024 [German Historical Institute Washington])

Pete Millwood: Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (book, Cambridge University Press 2023 [Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations])

Alexis Peri: Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women (book, Harvard University Press 2024)

Elisabeth Piller: Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933 (book, Franz Steiner Verlag 2021 [German Historical Institute Washington])

The jury’s final decision will be announced in mid-December 2025. We encourage all our readers to pick up a copy of one or more of these works!