The Cunliffe Centre is named in honour of Marcus Cunliffe, Professor of American Studies at the University of Sussex from 1965 to 1980. Through his work on the history and literature, politics and culture of the United States, Marcus Cunliffe exemplified the combination of comparative and interdisciplinary work which the Centre seeks to sponsor. Whether he wrote of the institutional Presidency or of George Washington's human and monumental record, of the martial spirit or of wage and chattel slavery, of literary history or the history of property rights, his interpretation of the American experience was always informed by his knowledge of Britain, Canada or continental Europe. In this tradition, the Cunliffe Centre is driven to sponsor discussions which bridge disciplinary and national boundaries and facilitate collaborative research and educational projects.
Marcus Cunliffe went on from Sussex to the distinguished position of University Professor at George Washington University, in Washington DC, which he held until his death in 1990. His home in Washington and his personal network of friends, colleagues and students became an informal transatlantic research community. This personal link is commemorated in a Cunliffe Bursary, for Sussex postgraduate research students to visit archives in Washington and give them access to activities at George Washington University.
The appointment of Marcus Cunliffe to the Chair of American Studies in 1965, a position which he held until 1980, initiated the internationally recognised tradition of comparative and interdisciplinary work in American Studies at Sussex. Marcus Cunliffe was the author of more than a dozen books which ranged encyclopaedically across the disciplines of history, literature and politics. Among his best known works are The Literature of the United States, George Washington: Man and Monument, and American Presidents and the Presidency. His books, articles, collaborations in museum exhibitions, were all intended to communicate to a non-specialist as well as an academic audience. He influenced a generation of younger scholars in Britain, Europe, and the United States, may of whom now teach at universities in their home countries. A past-President of the British Association of American Studies, he was also much involved in the European Association and maintained close links with West and East European scholars. In 1980, he moved to a prestigious University Professorship at George Washington University; he died prematurely of leukemia in September 1990.
A festschrift, American Studies: Essay in Honour of Marcus Cunliffe edited by Brian Holden Reid and John White, was published in 1991. In his introduction to this volume, American historian Arthur J Schlesinger Jr summed up the legacy of Marcus Cunliffe, for whom the Centre is named: "All Cunliffe's writing revolves around questions of nationhood, national identity, national peculiarity, national culture, national iconography, national tradition . . . He sees the nationality riddles as they must properly be seen: as ultimately intelligible only in a comparative context. [In Cunliffe's words] 'It might now be necessary to reinterpret American history and culture vis-a-vis Europe on a comparative and continuing basis.'" A new edition under the title Americana: Essays in Memory of Marcus Cunliffe was later published in 1998.
For more information, please see Brian Holden Reid's excellent biography of Marcus Cunliffe in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography