When Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous ”Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, MO on March 5, 1946, he coined the phrase ”special relationship” referring to the alliance between Great Britain and the United States. This idea aimed to shape a new alliance between Britain and the US in a post-world war II dominated by the USA (and the USSR) based on a belief in a shared cultural history and a common language.
If you watched the first meeting between PM Keir Stamer and POTUS Donald J. Trump on February 27 2025, you certainly got a taste of what that "special relationship" means today.
This course will first introduce students to the history of those ”special relations” between the US and the UK and then proceed to use recent, highly successful Anglo-American rom-coms to analyze how popular culture weighs in on the debates of political relations and national identities from President Bush’s ”Poodle” PM Tony Blair to the attempted and failed Americanization of the Royal Family by the (former) Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Not only will students learn to identify and debate historical, political, narrative and visual representations of "Americanness" and "Britishness", but also discover how popular culture and media can turn foreign politics into a matter of sexual relationships and love, actually. |
