Consumerism and the End of the Cold War

Professor Emily Rosenberg delivers this year’s keynote address at the 2008 annual International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, taking place this year at UCSB.
Emily Rosenberg’s research and teaching interests focus on the history of U.S. economic and cultural expansion from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her fields of interest include U.S. International Relations as well as Gender and International Relations. She explores how U.S. foreign policy assisted the remarkable cultural and economic expansionism that turned the United States into a global superpower. Two of her numerous books, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 and Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930, deal with such cultural and economic concerns. Within the broad area that includes the history of U.S. international policies and Americans’ various relationships to people and countries in the rest of the world, her research is especially attentive to issues of cultural construction and contestation.

Among her many professional activities, Prof. Rosenberg has served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), been a Board member of the Organization of American Historians, and co-edited, with Gilbert Joseph, the American Encounters, Global Interactions book series for Duke University Press.