Ben Martin writes and teaches on the history of twentieth-century international cultural relations. His current research uses digital methods to explore the intellectual history of cultural diplomacy, and to develop a global historical approach to the development of ideas at UNESCO.

Earlier work includes The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016), which tells the story of how the German-Italian Axis sought to create a "New Order" in European cultural life in the 1930s and during WWII.

LATEST:

New Publication
The latest article from my project “International Ideas at UNESCO,” in which we present the curated digital text corpora we prepared of the UNESCO Courier, has now been published in the Journal of Open Humanities Data. The corpora — consisting of machine-readable texts of all articles published in the English-language edition of Courier between 1948 and 2020 — are available for download on Zenodo.

Why does Hollywood keep remaking Swedish movies?
I did a short interview on Uppsala’s local radio station P4 Uppland (in Swedish) to talk about the economics and culture behind the fact that Hollywood so often remakes Swedish movies in new American versions. Listen here; the conversation starts at 1:09:35.

Using Topic Modeling to Track “Nature” and “Culture” in UNESCO’s Courier Magazine
A finalized version of the paper I presented at the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) 2023 conference, co-written with Fredrik Mohammadi Norén, has been published: “Nature and Culture in the Age of Environmental Crisis: Digital Analysis of a Global Debate in The UNESCO Courier, 1948-2020,” in the DHNB 2023 conference proceedings (University of Oslo Press, 2023). Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for helpful and demanding comments.