Franklin & Marshall College

David Kieran is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies. His teaching and research focus on contemporary U.S. culture with a particular emphasis on examining how cultural products shape ideas about recent U.S. foreign policy, the place of the military in American society, and the public remembrance of war from Vietnam to the War on Terror. His book, “Sundered by a Memory:” Foreign Policy, Militarism, and the Vietnamization of American Memory is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press’ Culture, Politics, and the Cold War series, and he is also editing “The War of My Generation:” 9/11 and the War on Terror in American Youth Culture, a collection of critical essays on how the Millennial generation has experienced the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the wars that have followed. His articles have appeared in War and Society, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, M/MLA: The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association, and in several edited collections. Kieran’s next research project will be a cultural and social history of how U.S. veterans, the U.S. military, NGOs, and Iraqi and Afghan civilians have responded to the transnational mental health crisis that the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced. An article based on this research, "'We Combat Veterans Have a Responsibility to Ourselves and Our Families: Domesticity and the Politics of PTSD," is forthcoming in American Studies. He is also the co-founder and administrator of the War and Peace Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association.

At Franklin & Marshall, Kieran teaches “9/11 and the War on Terror in U.S. Culture,” “U.S. /Middle East Relations in Foreign Policy and Popular Culture,” “U.S. Cultures / Global Cultures,” and “Introduction to American Studies” as well as a Foundations Course, “Trauma and Memory.”

Before coming to Franklin and Marshall, Kieran was Post-Doctoral Fellow in the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his doctorate in American Studies from the George Washington University, where among other positions he was a research assistant at the National Museum of American History and the University’s Center for the Study of Public History and Public Culture. He earned his BA in English from Connecticut College.