From 1997 to 2005 Cull was based at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, where he held the chair in American Studies and served as Director of the Centre for American Studies. His research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary, centering on the developing academic discipline of Public Diplomacy, the role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He has also worked more broadly on film, television and radio history and the role of the mass media as a source for historical study.

Cull earned both his B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Leeds. While a graduate student he studied at Princeton University as a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York. From 1992 to 1997 he was lecturer in American History at the University of Birmingham.

He is the president of the International Association for Media and History, and has worked closely with the British Council's Counterpoint Think Tank. He is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

In April 2008 Cull's USC program was a co-winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy, awarded by the U.S. Department of State.

Nicholas J. Cull is author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. (Cambridge University Press 2008). This and his first book -- Selling War, (Oxford University Press, 1995) -- was named by Choice Magazine as one of the outstanding academic texts of the year.

Cull is the co-editor of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500—present (2003) which was one of Book List magazine’s reference books of the year, and co-editor with David Carrasco of Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (2004).