Conference: Constructing America | Defining Europe. Perceptions of the Transatlantic Other, 1900- 2000

Coffee/tea          08.30- 09.00

Session 1         09.00-10.30

Panel 1 | The Question of Race | Chair: Rachel Gillett | Room: Grote Zolder

• Mark Leon de Vries | Trans-Atlantic Culture Wars – How American Discourses Have Shaped the Dutch (Anti-) Racism Debates
• George Blaustein | Strangers in the Village: James Baldwin, Margaret Mead, and the West
• Christoper S. Thompson | Dystopia or Inspiration? American Multiculturalism and Affirmative Action in Twenty-First-Century France

Panel 2 | European Postwar Intellectuals | Chair: Vanessa Schwartz | Room: Kerkzaal

• Darius Harwardt | Seeking a “Third Way”? Right-wing Intellectuals in Postwar Germany and their Construction of America
• Andrea Scionti | “This Other America Is Everywhere”: French and Italian Intellectuals, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and American Cultural Diplomacy
• Andrew Daily | Tamed Desert: Chris Marker, François Reichenbach, and the Postwar American Dream

Coffee/tea             10.30-11.00

Session 2          11.00-13.00 | Plenary session: Partners or Opponents? Transatlantic Political Entanglements | Chair: Giles Scott-Smith | Room: Kerkzaal

• Jasper Trautsch | Defining the West and Building the Atlantic Community: The Ideological Origins of the Western Alliance
• Ben Zdencanovic | “Our Forefathers Left the British Road Long Ago:” The British National Health Service and the Idea of Universal Health Insurance in the United States, 1945 – 1952
• Ruud van Dijk | Ridding the World of Nuclear Weapons Through a Freeze? Transatlantic Activism Against the Nuclear Arms Race in the 1970s and ’80s
• Marloes Beers | Energizing Europe: The Unintentional American Enforcement of European Unity by the Anti-Siberian Pipeline Embargoes of 1982/83

Lunch              13.00-13.30

Keynote 2    13.30-15.00 | Mary Nolan: Is the Atlantic Widening? Politics and Policies in Europe and the U.S. since 1989 | Room: Kerkzaal

Coffee/tea       15.00-15.30

Session 3      15.30-17.30

Panel 5 | Using History | Chair: Brooke Blower | Room: Grote Zolder

• Jaap Verheul | Europe- mania, 1890- 1918
• Michael Zontos | The Significance of Europe in Frederick Jackson Turner’s Histories of the United States
• Nimrod Tal |  Understanding the United States by Enlisting to its Civil War: The British Fascination with of the American Civil War between the End of Empire and the American Century, 1915-1968
• Maurizio Vaudagna | Exploring Europe Through the American Past. “Old World” Americanist Historians and Their Visions of the United States

Panel 6 | The Age of Neoliberalism | Chair: Marianne van Leeuwen | Room: Kerkzaal

• Philipp Scherzer | “Do We Still Need Europe?” Neoconservative Perceptions of Europe and the Transatlantic Drift, 1970 – 2010
• Kyle S. Shybunko | German-American political foundations in the age of neoliberalism
• Alessandra Bitumi | Jacques Delors’ Social Europe in the “Age of Reagan”
• Bram Mellink | Setting the Stage. The Public “Battle of Ideas” of the Early Neoliberals in the Netherlands (1945-1958)

Conference buffet         17.30