Teaching American History and Culture in Europe in an Age of Uncertainty

Benita Heiskanen: Although practiced in multiple ways in different institutional contexts—and by individual scholars—the key differentiating feature is that American studies is not a discipline but a field of study. [...]the liberal, futurist, and affirmative-optimistic view of the political, socio-economic, and cultural developments in the United States that once shaped the field in Europe have become widely problematized, both by Americanists in North America and in Europe (critical university studies, critical theory, critical race studies all come to mind in said context). Dario Fazzi: In 1958, when Sigmund Skard edited his two-volume collection of essays on the state-of-the-art of American studies in Europe, the consensus was that Great Britain, France, and Germany were setting the standard for the analysis of American history, politics, and culture in Europe, thus contributing to codifying a wider and supposedly homogeneous western civilization, while other European countries, from the Scandinavian ones to the ones facing the Mediterranean Sea, were just offering slight variations of themes, concepts, and methods that originated in British, German, or French academic circles. The Roosevelt Study Center (today, the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, or RIAS) was established in the mid-1980s against the backdrop of the tensions of the so-called second Cold War and increased dissatisfaction with U.S. policies, as embodied by the Euromissile crises.