Andrew Wulf

ajw87@le.ac.uk and andrew.wulf@nara.gov

Research

My dissertation studies the genesis of exhibition culture in American foreign policy and addresses U.S. cultural exhibitions in India, Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, and France from 1955 through 1975. I received my MA in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Southern California in 2005.

Career

My museum career started at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1999.  was employed at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2002 to 2003 while a grad student at the Courtauld Museum of Art, and have since worked at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and at USC's Fisher Museum of Art.

For the last six years I worked as Curator of Exhibitions for USC’s Special Collections, where I produced over twenty-five exhibitions that explored a wide range of human endeavor, including political subjects such as the Armenian Genocide, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the history of book burning. Most recently, in April of 2010, I was named Curator of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, part of the U.S. National Archives, where I helped direct the multi-million dollar renovation of the museum’s permanent galleries in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Reagan in February 2011.

In the last couple years, I have given papers at various international conferences. In 2009, at USC's Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars symposium, 'Cultural Diplomacy: Clash or Conversation?', I presented a paper that focused on the concept of American 'degeneracy' in late 18th century Europe and how the United States used cultural exhibitions to counter jingoistic attitudes toward the young American republic. Also in 2009, I gave a paper entitled 'American Attempts at Cultural Diplomacy through International Exhibitions during the Reagan Presidency, 1981-1989' at the Culture and International History IV Conference through the Universität zu Köln. This year, I have two publications on museums and international exhibitions coming out in Wiley-Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Globalization, edited by George Ritzer, as well as an article in Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, on Reagan-era  cultural diplomacy.

I continue in my role as a research fellow at USC's Center on Public Diplomacy (http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/about/bio_detail/andrew_wulf), where I promote collaboration and dialogue between museum and public diplomacy practitioners while investigating how civic and educative programming, like exhibitions, can serve people's lives more dynamically through cultural diplomacy models.