This presentation draws on Professor Stecopoulos’s recent book Telling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy (Oxford 2022), which reconsiders transnational American Studies in light of the struggle between U.S. cultural diplomacy and the global activism of U.S. writers. After providing an overview of the project, Professor Stecopoulos will focus on Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and other Black literary ambassadors who worked with—and against—the U.S. government’s propaganda campaign in sub-Saharan Africa.

Harilaos Stecopoulos is professor of English at the University of lowa. The former editor of
The lowa Review, he has published four books: Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Duke
1997); Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (Cornell 2008); A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge 2020); and Telling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy (Oxford 2022). He is currently at work on a new project, ”The Heat of Modernity: American Modernism and the Energy Economy.“