Norman Holmes Pearson and American Studies in Australia: America's Cold War Public--Private Partnership.

The Yale English professor and former intelligence agent Norman Holmes Pearson both epitomized and helped develop the deployment of the scholarly field of American Studies as a weapon in the Cold War. He leveraged his extensive connections in U.S. academia, professional societies, foundations, and the Department of State to help forge the state-private networks that drove U.S. cultural diplomacy in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as their focus turned from Europe to the Pacific region. He was particularly influential in Australia, where he helped direct money and influential scholars to the new American Studies programs at Australian universities and to ANZASA. In this, he embodied how the short-lived Pax Americana was built by bureaucrats and functionaries, until it collapsed in the wake of the Vietnam War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]