Cultural & Public Diplomacy in a Changing World

PDCA and its partner Lois Roth Foundation will recognize the work of Nicholas J. Cull and Pete Millwood, recipients of the inaugural Richard T. Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy, at a special presentation on August 19.

PDCA Board Member Nicholas J. Cull 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 (2004-19). Reputational Security is the most recent of his long list of publications on a wide array of topics.

Pete Millwood (Univ. of 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 Roth Foundation board lead for the Dick Arndt Prize and co-chaired the 2025 jury with Pauline Yang of the Public Diplomacy Council of America. 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.
 
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.

The event will take place at 5:00 p.m. on August 19 in room 505 of the GWU Elliott School for International Affairs, 1957 E Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20052. It will be followed by a reception honoring the award recipients.
 

To register to attend in-person, click here. 

To register for the Forum via Zoom, click here.