“America at 250: A View from Australia, Italy, and France,” January 30 America at 250 Lecture Series Kickoff

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The Kinder Institute’s America at 250 Lecture Series exploring the global significance of the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary kicks off on Friday, January 30, with a pair of talks delivered by University of Technology Sydney Professor Tamson Pietsch and Mario Del Pero of the Centre for History at Paris’ Sciences Po, who will provide a view of the nation’s past from the perspectives of Australia, France, and Italy (see descriptions below). The event will be held in the ballroom at the Tiger Hotel, with the talks starting at 5pm and a reception to follow. Anyone interested in attending can RSVP (recommended, but not required) using the link above.

“From the Farm to the Field: International Education, Land Endowments, and the Entangled Legacies of Freedom and Dispossession”

In 1970, my seventeen-year-old mother left a sheep and wheat farm in South Australia to spend a year in Wyoming on an American Field Service exchange. In her recollections, the United States represented freedom and possibility—not primarily through its politics, but through the social and intellectual liberties that contrasted sharply with her rural and religious upbringing. This formative narrative shaped my own early understanding of the United States and, in time, my scholarly interest in international education. In recent research, the two sites at the heart of that story—the farm and the United States—have converged through an examination of land endowments used to fund public education. Widely implemented in the United States and adopted in South Australia in the 1870s, these policies linked education, agriculture, and settler state-building while resting on the dispossession of unceded Indigenous land. Tracing these connections at both a personal and historiographical level, this paper reflects on the intertwined legacies of international education, agrarian development, and Indigenous dispossession across the settler world.

“Discovering America, Escaping Europe: The Unlikely Journey of an Italian Wanna-Be Americanist”

In August 1987, as a high school junior, I found myself parachuted from my hometown in the Dolomites—a bucolic tourist haven I had never left at age seventeen—into Griffith, Lake County, Indiana, just a few miles from the crumbling steel city of Gary. That year abroad was my first encounter with an America I thought I already knew through its cultural exports—cinema, music, sports—but which turned out to be far less familiar (or ‘European’) than I had imagined.

Since then, I have spent much of my life trying to make sense of that America—its contradictions, its uniqueness—and attempting to explain it first to myself, then to my students, and eventually to a broader public. At the same time, America itself, and my many (too many) journeys there, has offered me something else: a space of escape. That impulse toward escapism is hardly unique. It is shared by countless scholars who dedicate their lives to studying countries, regions, or cultures other than the ones into which they were born, where they grew up, and where they now reside.

Most recently the author of The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago University Press, 2023), Tamson Pietsch is an Associate Professor in Social and Political Sciences at University of Technology Sydney and Director of UTS’ Australian Centre for Public History.

A scholar of US, Diplomatic, and Transnational History, Mario Del Pero is a Professor in the Centre for History at Paris’ Sciences Po

The Spring 2026 America at 250: Global Perspectives Lecture Series is brought to you in partnership with the State Historical Society of Missouri