Political nostalgia helps explain the divisive rhetoric shaping contemporary United States politics, pointed out JWAM lecturer Dr Jennifer Cowe in a talk at UBC.
In the talk on October 23, Dr. Cowe focused on the Trump-era discourse, collective anxiety about the future, and the mental health toll of continued political engagement.
“Yearning for the past has become natural as the general public is presented with more and more reasons to be pessimistic about the present and future. As a result, nostalgic political rhetoric that romanticizes the past, for example, the American Dream, gains emotional appeal,” she said.
The event took place at the Arts Compass Student Engagement Hub. It drew together former and current WRDS students, as well as political science majors interested in the politics of nostalgia, how it is researched, and the effects of academic bias.
“There really is this very odd juxtaposition of ‘everything’s going wrong, everything is going to change’ and there is this political rhetoric of ‘returning to the past.’”
Dr Cowe outlined how recurring appeals to a simpler past intersect with anxiety about the future and with the mental health toll of constant political news. She argued that sustained exposure to negative headlines can strain younger audiences and that nostalgia gives political messages emotional force by promising a return to what people remember as stable and fair.
Her interdisciplinary approach to the problem provided crucial context and theory on how political identity is shaped in the United States of America.
“There really is this very odd juxtaposition of ‘everything’s going wrong, everything is going to change’ and there is this political rhetoric of ‘returning to the past’ and I think a huge part of that is a fear of the future,” she said.
Future nostalgia
In 2022 she published an article titled “Past Perfect(ed): Future Nostalgia and the Fight Against Trump’s America in Netflix’s Hollywood” in the European Journal of American Studies. The article frames media, nostalgia, and culture, employing a unique lens on political science research.
Her WRDS 151 research course, The Politics of Nostalgia, attracts students from diverse backgrounds and places her work in ongoing debates about media influence, identity and polarization in the United States
“I tried to show the human side of this topic as I clearly don’t have all the answers and encouraged participants to disagree with me or pushback on certain points that they knew more about.”
Her scholarship underscores the importance of examining not only what Americans remember about their past, but also how these memories are mobilized to imagine, or resist, the future. Her forthcoming publications on memory and legacy in American culture include:
- Cowe, J. (2026) ‘We are now in the mountains and they are in us’: Solastalgia, Manifest Destiny and the Contemporary Ideological Battle for America’s Environmental Legacy. In F. Mehring (Ed.), Powered by Nature – The Environment in Sustainable American Studies. Routledge.
- Cowe, J.(2026) ‘You’re Fired’: Joy Reid’s Final MSNBC show and the Palliative of Progressive Nostalgia.’ Television and New Media.
Dr. Cowe earned her PhD in American Studies from the University of Glasgow in 2016.
Photo by Julie Hoang.
