Faculty note: Morgan

Historian Eric J. Morgan, assistant professor in Democracy and Justice Studies, recently returned from Russia, where he presented a paper at the international conference, The Cold War on Film: Then and Now, sponsored by the German Historical Institute. The conference gathered international scholars of film and history in Moscow to debate various portrayals of the Cold War in cinema beyond Hollywood. Morgan’s paper, “Whores and Angels of Our Striving Selves: The Cold War Films of John le Carré,” explored the searing critiques offered by two prominent film adaptations of le Carré’s Cold War novels, Martin Ritt’s 1965 film The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 work, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. These two films, Morgan concludes, condemn Western intelligence practices of the Cold War era as “a dangerous game that led to the degradation of essential Western principles of democracy and accountability, eroding the very souls of Great Britain and the United States in the process.” Morgan also recently published a review of David Wyatt’s When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968 in the interdisciplinary journal Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone.