Alexander Dunst

I am a cultural historian of twentieth-century America. I currently work in the Department of English at the University of Paderborn. I previously taught at the University of Potsdam and completed a PhD in Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham.

My research on the Cold War era focuses on the relationship between expert discourse and popular cultural narratives, from literature to film and television.

As part of this work, I’ve co-edited the essay collection The World According to Philip K. Dick (Palgrave, 2015), which situates this science-fiction author in the context of Cold War religion, psychiatry and nuclear culture.

My first monograph, titled Madness in Cold War America (Routledge, 2016) argued that metaphors of psychosis become a preeminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States during the early Cold War.

More recently, I’ve begun work on a digital history project on the “Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation”, which took place in London in 1967. It brought together different strands of left-wing opposition in a unique event that questions some of our accepted notions about the Sixties counterculture and its afterlives.