David J. Snyder teaches a broad range of courses in U.S., European, and U.S. foreign relations history.

A former Fulbright Fellow, Dr. Snyder’s research examines the evolution and international reception of American economic and cultural power during the Cold War. In particular, Dr. Snyder is interested in how “public diplomacy” projected American power within transnational cultural and political space. The burgeoning scholarship on public diplomacy is interested in the complex reception of American economic and cultural power among foreign audiences – commonly referred to as “Americanization.” Public diplomacy scholarship is also increasingly concerned with the no-less complicated patterns of transmission of American culture abroad. This attention to the mutual interplay of reception and transmission helps to reveal the linkage between U.S. foreign relations and domestic American culture, one of public diplomacy scholarship’s signal contributions to the field of U.S. diplomatic history.

He has published a number of articles on U.S. and foreign public diplomacy, including “The Problem of Power in Modern Public Diplomacy: The Netherlands Information Bureau and the United States in World War II and the Early Cold War” in Kenneth Osgood and Brian Etheridge, eds., The United States and Public Diplomacy: Toward an International History, (Leiden: Brill, expected 2009).

Dr. Snyder’s first book is a multi-archival case study of U.S. relations with the Netherlands during the early Cold War, and will be published as The Dutch Encounter with the American Century: Clientelism and Modernization in the Netherlands, 1945-1958 (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Republic of Letters Publishing, expected 2013). The Dutch Encounter with the American Century is the first book-length examination of “Americanization” in the Netherlands, a small ally presumably susceptible to American influence in the period.