The Weapon of Words: Language Training in the American Century

FAIN: FEL-295018-24

Diana Lemberg
University of St. Andrews (St Andrews KY16 9AJ United Kingdom)

Research and writing leading to a book on U.S. investment in language training since World War II and its impact on foreign affairs and language education.

This book project investigates the history of U.S. investments in language training since World War II. After decades of disinterest, Washington began encouraging Americans and others to learn languages as it entered new theaters of conflict and cultural exchange in the 1940s, hoping to render the world legible to its strategists. From San Francisco to Saigon, it subsidized new institutions, funding streams, and pedagogies ranging from military schools to campus language labs to far-flung English courses. Yet as teachers and students at home and abroad were drawn into U.S. foreign policy, they voiced alternative rationales for language learning, emphasizing individual prerogatives over wartime and Cold War defense priorities. The book will expand our understanding of an issue central to humanists, albeit one that has been understudied by U.S. historians: how changing American conceptions of language learning have shaped U.S. diplomatic and cultural relations with the world.