January 13 EASC Colloq: Nick Cullather “Does Development Have a History?"

PRESENTER: Nick Cullather (History, IU Bloomington)

TOPIC: Does Development Have a History?
DATE: Friday, January 13, 2012

TIME: 12:00-1:15 p.m.
LOCATION: Ballantine 004

(Light refreshments will be served. You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.)

The 50th anniversary of the U.S. Agency for International Development came and went in November without a whisper of official or unofficial commemoration.  Interventions in the name of economic development had profound effects on landscapes and societies all over the world, nowhere more so than in Asia, but the subject is veiled in silence and myth.  Taking as an example the drive to modernize Asian agriculture in the 1960s--the so-called "Green Revolution"--Cullather will discuss how legends of development are made, used, and forgotten.

Nick Cullather is an associate professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. He is a historian of United States foreign relations specializing in the history of intelligence, development, and nation-building. His interests include the subtle mechanisms of power used by the United States such as aid, covert operations, diet, statistics, and technology to reconstruct the social reality of countries around the world. His most recent book The Hungry World (Harvard University Press, 2010), explores the use of food as a tool of psychological warfare and regime change during the Cold War.  His first book, Illusions of Influence (Stanford University Press, 1994), described the process through which a former American colony negotiated its conditional independence. In Secret History (Stanford University Press, 2006) Cullather shows how the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s developed a capacity to replace unsuitable governments, elected or otherwise. He is currently investigating the early history of the CIA, and asking why a country so committed to pluralism and the marketplace of ideas staked its security on the novel notion of central intelligence.  Putting vital information under control of a single authority has never fit comfortably with democratic ideals, and in a perennial political ritual, the “intelligence failure,” Americans question and reaffirm the CIA compromise.  His current project, First Line of Defense, follows this debate from 1947 to the present day.

Persons with disabilities interested in attending our events who may require assistance, please contact us in advance at (812) 855-3765.

East Asian Studies Center

Indiana University

1021 East Third Street

Memorial Hall West 207

Bloomington, IN  47405

Phone:  (812) 855-3765

Fax:  (812) 855-7762

http://www.iu.edu/~easc/

E-mail:  easc@indiana.edu

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