Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and director of the Master\'s program in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. British-born, he came to USC in 2005 from the University of Leicester, where he was a professor of American Studies and Director of the Centre for American Studies.

His research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary, centering on the history and the present role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He is author of the recent report for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: ,Public Diplomacy: Lessons from the Past, and the forthcoming The Cold Way and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge University Press 2008).

He is president of the International Association for Media and History, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Public Diplomacy Council.

Art has always been central to a nation's attempt to articulate its culture and to define its preoccupations, values, characteristics, challenges and successes. Using approaches from the conventional gift of art to the more complex arena of art-centered capacity-building, cultural diplomacy expands upon these efforts and strives to engage publics abroad with the home country.

Practitioners of public diplomacy - the broader category into which cultural diplomacy falls - have often been criticized for acting as agents of propaganda. However, at heart of this publication is the ability of art to explore complex questions in a powerful and creative format, and to act as a driver for dialogue around contentious issues. War, racism, consumerism - all are topics which have been address admirably through the medium of theatre in both Britain and America.

This work is the product of Nicholas Cull. Its intent is similar to that of the British Council and other cultural relations organizations - to stimulate robust debate rather than to arrive at a comfortable consensus. There is no doubt that some of the work discussed is controversial, but the contribution of contemporary art abroad is invaluable in the context of cultural relations, building mutual trust and understanding outside of official political structures.