Aimée Plukker

I am a historian of the United States in the world and modern and contemporary Europe, specializing in transatlantic political culture. My research explores how visual and material culture produces political practices, social relations, and ideas about the past, present, and future. More broadly, my work draws on approaches from Cold War, urban, and tourism history, international relations, visual studies, political economy, and critical and spatial theory. My research has been published in Radical History Review, Journal of Material Culture, and several edited volumes, including the forthcoming Urban Authenticity and Heritage after 1945, as well as the public history book Amsterdam 750 Years. A Fascinating History of the City.

My book manuscript, Europe Calling: Cold War U.S. Tourism and the Production of “the West,” argues that post-WWII tourism was a crucial instrument of U.S. power in the reinvention of “the West” as a new geopolitical category binding the United States and Europe. Focusing on U.S. tourism to Rome, Berlin, and Amsterdam, it examines how policymakers, corporations, advertising agencies, and the culture industry mobilized tourism to reshape “the West” as both a material and imagined space, transforming tourists’ encounters with Europe while altering local and global social relations. Based on visual and written sources in English, Dutch, German, Italian, and French from nearly forty repositories across Europe and the United States, the book demonstrates in what ways tourism cultivated narratives of community and shared historical roots. It reveals how appeals to the past of “Western civilization” helped legitimize a U.S.-led “West” and advance its broader Cold War political and economic ambitions.

I received my PhD from Cornell University in 2026, following a BA (Honors) and Research MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. During my doctoral research, I held fellowships at the German Historical Institute in Rome and Washington, D.C., the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence, the Center for Austrian Studies Seminar at the University of Minnesota, and Cornell’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. My research has been supported by numerous grants from institutions including the American Historical Association, the Max Weber Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Truman Library, Duke University’s John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, the Cultuurfonds, the VSBfonds, and Cornell’s Institute for European Studies.

I have served as reviews editor of the Journal of Tourism History since 2023 and previously worked as an editorial assistant for BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review. Beyond academic publishing, I contribute to public humanities through articles and op-eds for outlets such as The Metropole, The Dutch Review of Books (dNBg), and various Dutch periodicals.