Scott Lucas has been on the staff of the University of Birmingham since 1989 and has been Professor of American Studies since 1997. A specialist in US and British foreign policy, he has written and edited seven books, including Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis; Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union, 1945-56; George Orwell: Life and Times; and The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens, and the New American Century, and published more than 30 major articles. He is the Executive Director of Libertas: The Centre for the Study of US Foreign Policy, Adjunct Professor of the Institute for North American and European Studies at the University of Tehran, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for American Studies and Research at American University Beirut. He is also the Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies.

Scott Lucas is a frequent contributor to American, British, and international media. A former essayist for the New Statesman, he has written and presented Suez: The Missing Dimension for BBC Radio 4 and co-directed the 2007 film Laban! on the “People’s Power” rising of 1986 in the Philippines.

Current Research

Professor Lucas is currently completing two articles on the legacy of the Suez Crisis and a trilogy of articles on US foreign policy, political warfare, and “liberation” from the Cold War to the War on Terror. This will be followed by a breakthrough book, Empire of Liberation?: How America (and the Bush Administration) Failed to Lead the World, to be published in 2010. The research for this project is supported by a two-year fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.

A native of Alabama in the southeastern United States, Professor Lucas is still a keen fan of baseball, stock car racing, and The Onion.

Current Teaching

• US Foreign Policy since 1945
• US Intelligence Services and Foreign Policy
• Media and Conflict
  

Postgraduate Supervision

Scott Lucas is currently supervising 10 Master's and PhD dissertations in US Foreign Policy from 1945 to the Present; US-Iranian Relations; US and the Middle East; British Foreign Policy; Politics, Film, and Television

Recent Publications

Books

The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens, and the New American Century (London: Pluto, 2004)

George Orwell: Life and Works (London: Haus, 2003)

Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956 (New York: New York University Press and Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999)

Articles

“Suez”, Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (August 2007)

“Enduring Freedom: US Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy,” American Quarterly (June 2005)

“Negotiating ‘Freedom’,” in Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford (eds.), The State-Private Network: The United States Government, American Citizen Groups, and the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2005)

“‘A Bright Shining Mecca’”: British Culture and Political Warfare in the Cold War and Beyond,” in William Roger Louis (ed.), More Studies in Britannia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)

“Approaching Race and ‘Americanism’: The NAACP and the State in the Early Cold War,” in SabineBroeck and Paula Boi (eds.), Cross Routes: The Meaning of Race in the 21st Century (Lit Verlag, 2003)

“Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control: Approaches to Culture and the State-Private Network in the Cold War,” in Hans Krabbendam and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945-1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2003)

“Master and Servant? The US Government and the Founding of the British Association for American Studies,” European Journal of American Culture (2002)

“Commentary: ‘Total Culture’ and the State-Private Network” and “Analysis of Henry Kissinger and the Harvard Summer School Seminar,” in Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher (eds.), Culture and International Relations (Cambridge, MA: Berghahn, 2002)

“Mobilising Culture: The CIA and State-Private Networks in the Early Cold War" in D. Carter and R. Clifton (eds.), Global Horizons (London: Macmillan, 2002)

“Culture, Ideology, and History,” Global Dialogue (October 2001)

Broadcast documentary

Writer and presenter, The Archive Hour: Suez, BBC Radio 4 (October 2006)