Cold War Power: A Conference

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9am-9:15 Welcome Remarks

Victoria Phillips

9:15-10:30 Women and Children as Cold War Weapons

Commentator: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

• Stephanie Sonkin, “Tricks of the Trade: Misperceptions of the Soviet-Finnish Relationship in American Trading Cards, 1939-1964”
• Helen Cane, “American Students on Foreign Soil: Prague 1946 and the Cold War Youth Race”
• Anna Pershikova, “THE SOVIET ‘FIRST LADY’: The Curious Case of Nina Khrusheva”
• Sunny Chen, “Grace Hartigan in the ‘Men’s Club’ of American Abstract Expressionism”

10:30-11:15 “Cultural Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War” 

Arthur Zegelbone

Arthur Zegelbone retired after a twenty five-year career with the U.S. Information Agency in 2000.  Since leaving the Foreign Service, Mr. Zegelbone has continued his involvement in international cultural exchange.  He has served for six years as a paid advisor to the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program and to Meridian International Center; he has been contracted as a consultant to the Danish Arts Council and the Danish National Gallery; he has taught a graduate course, International Cultural and Educational Exchange, at New York University; he has raised funds for several international cultural institutions in New York, and currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, and as a Board member of American Friends of the Danish Statens Museum for Kunst.

As a Foreign Service Officer, Mr. Zegelbone served first in Latin America and then moved to East Asia, spending nine years in Japan, the last four as Cultural Affairs Officer at the American Embassy in Tokyo and a year as Japan-Korea Country Officer in Washington.  Between tours in Japan, he served as Information Officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.  Mr. Zegelbone is the recipient of two USIA Meritorious Service Awards: one for creativity in cultural programming, the other for successfully negotiating the first consensus resolution in a decade at the UN’s Committee on Information.

Mr. Zegelbone earned his B.A. in English Literature from Indiana University and has an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

11:30-1 Communists on the Airwaves

Commentator: Arthur Zegelbone

• Alexandra Fay, “Paul Robeson: Soft Power Problem”
• Andrew Pasquier, “Diversity for Export: Soviet Folk Dance and Ethnic Music Plays in the West”
• Peter Zalokostas, “Radio Marti: The U.S. Radio Broadcasting Program in Cuba During the Early 1980’s & Cuba’s Radio War”
• Elena Burger, “Unlocking Watergate: VOA and Russian Coverage”

1-1:15  Lunch Break

1:15-2:00  “Soft Power as a Social Invention: Managing the Post-Cold War Interregnum, 1990-2010”

Victoria de Grazia

2:15-3:15 The Geography of the Cold War

Commentator: Francois Carrel-Billiard

• Abagail Schoenfeld, “NATO on the Black Sea: A Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of Turkey’s NATO Entry”
• Afra Wang, “Propaganda and Education: How The State Normalized Nuclear Power In Cold War China”
• Shelby Unger, “Covert Action in Post-Colonial Africa”

3:30-4:30 Books, “Spooks,” and Buildings

Commentator: Elizabeth Leake

• Carla Coley, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Snoop:Depictions of the Soviet Spy Scandal in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Its Role as British Spy Narrative Propaganda”
• Hayley Mendelson, “An Arsenal of Books”
• Giancarlo Milea, “The New Humanity: Modernism and the Protestant Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair”

4:30-5pm Closing Remarks

Victoria Phillips

From Columbia’s European Institute