Who is telling the story of the Cold War, where and to whom? American historian Penny M. Von Eschen will present her new book Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989 (Duke University Press, 2022) on 9 March at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, room P317, at 17:30.

In it, she explores what politicians, journalists, and popular culture have said and are saying about the Cold War and its end. In doing so, she traces the consequences of the US triumphalist narrative and nostalgia for the Soviet Union from a global perspective: from Lithuanian museums of communism to American video games, the fulfilled fears of Václav Havel and Russian ethno-nationalism.

Penny M. Von Eschen (Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia) has long been a scholar of the Cold War. She has published, among other books, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957.

The lecture and discussion will be in English.