Full conference description:
In 1963, historian George L. Mosse was invited by his colleague Gordon Craig to give an extended seminar on the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism at Stanford University. The purpose of the seminar was to critique draft chapters of The Crisis of German Ideology, the groundbreaking book Mosse was writing at the time. Participants included distinguished historians, philosophers, sociologists, literary studies specialists, economists, and political scientists from Germany, Spain, Iran, Great Britain, the United States, and beyond. Over the course of a semester—and only eighteen years following the end of World War II—these scholars defined and debated the parameters of European fascism. They asked: What are the intellectual origins of right-wing populist political movements? To what degree was fascism a European revolution? Were individual charismatic leaders the driving forces behind Italian and Spanish fascism and Nazism? What was the relationship of the churches and other institutions to fascist movements? In short, they strove to better understand the development of fascism in the twentieth century by debating the origins and trajectory of rightist, anti-democratic European political movements.
Their discussions were often contentious. Mosse pushed the assembled professors to think of fascism as a comprehensive worldview that provided answers to its adherents in uncertain cultural and political moments. In a particularly heated exchange, Mosse, to the chagrin of many, declared, “I must object very sharply your saying these things are an ideological ragtag of ideas. That is a value judgment. I mean, we don’t like them, but it’s no more an ideological ragtag than any ideology.” In spite—or, perhaps, because—of these disagreements, however, the Stanford Seminar proved incredibly influential to the historiography of European fascism. Gordon Craig cited it in helping him develop the Sonderweg argument that modern Germany deviated from the rest of Western Europe by not adopting liberal democracy and the values of the Enlightenment after national unification in 1871. Meanwhile, Mosse himself went on to publish not only The Crisis of German Ideology (1964, 2021), but also such volumes as Nazi Culture (1966) and The Nationalization of the Masses (1974, 2023), which drew upon themes and ideas he first raised in Stanford in 1963.
The original seminar was, nevertheless, limited. Little attention was given to lived experiences, including those of women, colonial subjects, soldiers, and the victims of fascist movements. Though some of the attendees would later make major contributions to the history of gender and sexuality, the discussion did not address fascist views of the body or stereotypes. Reflecting its time, few women participated in the seminar. The Stanford discussion also did not consider the varied utopias and empires that fascists hoped to create, nor did they weigh the importance of those who actively resisted Nazism, Italian Fascism, and other European anti-democratic movements. And though Mosse advocated for the importance of understanding fascism in the context of popular culture, many of his peers continued to frame their analyses within the less-fertile realms of diplomatic and political history.
In the past half-century, these limitations have only grown more apparent. New studies have stressed the entangled relations, ties, and mutual transnational influences between right-wing radical movements, parties, and regimes, complicating the consensus view of fascism that the Stanford Seminar helped to pioneer. Meanwhile, other studies on fascist empires, colonialism, the disparate nature of European far-right worldviews, and the lived experiences of the victims of fascism have changed the terms of scholarly debate concerning the nature, characteristics, goals, and agenda of fascism. And yet the concept of “fascism” has nevertheless re-emerged with particular force as Europe and North America once again encounter new politics, radical and destabilizing rhetoric, and unprecedented events like 6 January 2021 in the United States, German coup conspiracies, and rightist coalitions. Indeed, the word itself is often used as a sort of passe-partout to describe deeply different political and temporal phenomena, encouraging many public-facing scholars to write and opine about an eternal and universal “fascism.”
For these reasons, and in the spirit of the original Stanford Seminar, the George L. Mosse Program in History proposes to once again examine fascism in light of contemporary populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian movements and ideologies. Participants will represent the geographic diversity of current proto-fascist and fascist movements, including Eastern and Western Europe. They will also include experts from three generations of scholars who have worked on the history of fascism. They will be asked some of the same questions Mosse and others posed in 1963: What is meant by fascism? How does fascism co-opt institutions? How do historians deploy the term as compared to public commentators?
However, the speakers will also be asked to consider new, pressing questions, which reflect how the debate over the meaning and definition of fascism have shifted in our current political constellation. For instance, the 2025 conference will also ask: Can historians make comparisons between different national contexts? What constitutes a “fascist empire”? How did European far-right movements seek to reshape the bodies of their populace? And is it meaningful to use the terms “fascism” and “fascist” to describe contemporary political movements?
There is no question that it is high-time for such a reexamination. For example, the American Historical Association recently featured an Oxford-Style Debate, “Resolved: Fascism Is Back,” where scholars discussed the utility of the term “fascism” in examining contemporary global political crises. And since 2016, the common features of fascism are increasingly visible in Europe and the United States, including longing for a mythic past, for autocracy, for racial hierarchy, for political violence. Taken together, these features reveal if not an outright return of fascism, then the resurrection of many of its key elements. We need look no further than the 2017 spectacle of antisemitism and white supremacy on display at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and the current wave of violence against LBGTQ+ communities to see that concerns about resurgent fascism are not without merit. The explosion of online racist conspiracy theories, the detention of immigrants, widespread suspicion about the validity of elections, and the claim that executive branches should not be subject to constitutional constraints all indicate the continued vulnerability of liberal and representative governments to tyranny and anti-democratic politics. Against this backdrop, our conference endeavors to redefine fascism for our own time, sixty years after the classic debates from 1963.
Biographical statements:
Donatello Aramini is Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the Department of Political Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. He was visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2023 and Mosse-Friends Fellow in 2011 and 2022 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught the History of contemporary Italy and the history of journalism at the Roma Tre University and University of Cassino. He is a member of the editorial board of Mondo contemporaneo. Rivista di storia and Giornale di storia. His research examines nationalism, Fascism, racism and the history of historiography. He is the author of the books George L. Mosse, l’Italia e gli storici (2010) and La rivoluzione nazionale: I nazionalisti, il fascismo e la fine dello Stato liberale (1919-1927) (2023). He has co-edited with Skye Doney and Laura Ciglioni the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History “George L. Mosse, Nationalism and the Crises of Liberal Democracies” (2021) and the book La contemporaneità del passato. Studi in onore di Renato Moro (2021). In 2023 co-edited a special issue of Mondo contemporaneo on the centenary of the March on Rome. He is currently working on a monograph on the myth of Rome in Fascist Italy.
Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. He is the author of four monographs that explore Jewish contribution to German “national culture” throughout the twentieth century. They include Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (2020); and the forthcoming (co-authored) Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany. He has published articles and edited books on various topics in German and Jewish history, including memory culture in Germany and Israel; Nazi-related humor in Germany; Jewish youth in Nazi Germany; German-Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine; the German antiwar movement; and exile photography.
Pamela Ballinger is Professor of History and the Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (2003); La Memoria dell’Esilio (2010), and The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (2020). Her research focuses on refugees and human rights, migration, seascapes, empire and decolonization, and borderlands. She is currently at work on two book projects: “An Intimate Sea: Sovereignties, Cartographies and Nature along the Modern Adriatic” and “Materializing Mussolini’s Mediterranean: Infrastructures of Fascist Empire.”
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, his early research concerned war crimes in World War II and the links between war and genocide. He has also written on representations of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently he has focused on interethnic relations, violence, and population displacement in Europe and Palestine. His latest books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine,” which is dedicated to investigating the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel, a generation to which he also belongs. His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.
Annette Becker is Professor Emerita of Modern History at Paris-Nanterre and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has written extensively on the Two World Wars and the extreme violence they nurtured, with an emphasis on military occupations. She is now devoting her research to genocides (against the Armenians, against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Holocaust) including humanitarian politics, trauma and memory, particularly among intellectuals and artists. Her latest publications include Messagers du désastre: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les genocides (2018) (Messengers of Disaster: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski and Twentieth-Century Genocides [2021]); L’Immontrable. Guerres et violences extrêmes dans l’art et la littérature (2021); Des Juifs trahis par leur France, 1939-1944 (2024); and Le choc. Le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda, 1994, with Jean-Philippe Schreiber, Samuel Kuhn, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (2024).
Raffaele Bedarida is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. An associate professor or art history at Cooper Union, he holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Bedarida’s research has focused on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War. He has also worked on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. His most recent books include Exhibiting Italian Art in the U.S. Futurism to Arte Povera: Like a Giant Screen (2022); Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, co-edited with Sharon Hecker (2022); and Corrado Cagli: Transatlantic Bridges, 1938-1947 (2023). Bedarida’s research has received support from: Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA), Terra Foundation for American Art, Italian Ministry of University and Research, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Kathleen Belew is author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018), which explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy.
Lorenzo Benadusi is Professor of Contemporary History and European Cultural History at the Roma Tre University. His work analyzes the history of sexuality and homosexuality, gender, and masculinity from the unification of Italy to the Fascist period. He is author of The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy (2012) and Respectability and Violence: Military Values, Masculine Honor and Italian’s Road to Mass Death (2021).
Darcy Buerkle is Professor of History at Smith College where she has served as chair of her department and Smith’s Faculty Council. Professor Buerkle has also held the Walter Benjamin Chair in German Jewish History and Culture at the Humboldt Universitäz zu Berlin. Her recent publications include an co-edited volume, Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination, with Skye Doney, and a forthcoming volume, The Force of Elsewhere: Fred Zinnemann’s Cinematic Evasions. Her current book project is tentatively titled “Surgeons of Democracy” and explores women’s transnational organizing against Fascism from 1930-1955 with particular attention to Black and Jewish women’s coalition building.
Jonathon Catlin is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He earned his Ph.D. in History and Interdisciplinary Humanities from Princeton University in 2023. His dissertation and current book project is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century German thought, from the First World War to the climate crisis, with a focus on German and Jewish thinkers including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His research has been supported by a Fulbright Research Grant to Germany, where he was a visiting researcher at Berlin’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, and by the Berlin Program at Freie Universität Berlin. His research has been published in History and Theory, Memory Studies, Radical Philosophy, Antisemitism Studies, and edited volumes about the Frankfurt School and antisemitism, Zygmunt Bauman, and environmental apocalypse. He has also written on topics including Holocaust memory, the AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics, and representations of climate catastrophe for popular publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, HuffPost, The Point, The Spectator, and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, where he is a contributing editor.
Giuliana Chamedes is Mellon Morgridge Associate Professor of History at UW Madison. Her first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (2019), explores right-wing religious internationalism, epistemic hegemony, and the reinvention of “Europe” after World War I. It won several awards. Book two (in process), “Unpaid Debts: European Socialists, the Global South, and the Struggle for Economic Decolonization,” investigates the movement for global economic equality. She is also writing a book with Udi Greenberg, Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is working with Monica Kim and a group of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists on a multi-year project, titled “The Global History of Austerity, Then and Now.” She has written about left and right-wing internationalism and the history of the global economic order in several academic journals and edited volumes, as well as in non-academic publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and The Nation.
Austin J. Clements is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University, where he studies American religious and intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. His dissertation, “Fear for a Lost God: Religion and the Transformation of the American Right, 1890-1950,” focuses on the emergence of anticommunism within American religious communities during the interwar period, and the relationship between American anticommunism, white supremacy and antisemitism, and the rise of Fascism. At Stanford, he has developed and taught courses on the history of American extremism and American nationalism. His article, “‘The Franco Way’: The American Right and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9,” was recently published in The Journal of Contemporary History. In addition to research and teaching, he is the founder and co-chair of the Religion, Politics, and Culture Workshop through the Stanford Humanities Center.
Manuela Consonni is the Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also the current director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Her books include: Resistance or Holocaust: The Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy, 1945-1985 (2010); L’eclisse dell’antifascismo. Resistenza, questione ebraica e cultura politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989 (2015); Three Faces of Antifascism: Narratives of Resistance in Italian Political Culture, forthcoming in spring-summer 2024, and a forthcoming book on Primo Levi, titled: Shedding Skins: Primo Levi on Human Evil, Suffering, and the Power to Resist.
António Costa Pinto is Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Georgetown University, a senior associate member at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and a senior visiting fellow at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley and New York University. His research interests include fascism and authoritarianism, political elites, and democratization. He is the author of The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascism in Inter-war Europe (2000); The Nature of Fascism Revisited (2012), Latin America Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism (2020) and he co-edited recently (with Federico Finchelstein) Authoritarian and Corporatism in Europe and Latin America: Crossing Borders (2019).
Jennifer Evans is Professor of European History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where she teaches about the history of sexuality, photography, and memory. In 2023, she published The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism. She co-edited a Festschrift in honor of her former Ph.D. supervisor and human rights historian Jean Quataert entitled Gender in Germany and Beyond with Shelley Rose and published the jointly written monograph Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape together with Meghan Lundrigan and Erica Fraser. Evans’s next book, How Photography Shaped the Sexual Revolution traces the role of image making in this period of social and legal change. She is currently researching another book-length project on the history of German drag, funded by the Humboldt Foundation’s Adenauer Prize. In addition to overseeing a many multi-platform big data project on social media, online hate, and the weaponization of history, she is co-curator of the New Fascism Syllabus and a founding member of the German Studies Collaboratory.
Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. He has taught at the History Department of Brown University and he received his Ph.D. at Cornell University. Finchelstein is Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at NSSR. Professor Finchelstein is the author of seven books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Hungarian, Korean and Turkish. His forthcoming book is The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy (2024)
Olivier Forlin is an associate professor of history, doctor in contemporary history, and lecturer at the Pierre Mendès France Grenoble-II University. He is a member of the Center for Research in the History of Italy and the Alpine Countries (CRHIPA). His research focuses on the historiography of fascism, the history of intellectuals and Franco-Italian relations in the 20th century. He is the author of Le fascism Historiographie et enjeux mémoriels (2013).
Diana Garvin is Assistant Professor of Italian with a focus on Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, and her A.B. from Harvard University. Her book, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (2021) explores how women fed their families through agricultural and industrial labor with a new body of evidence drawn from food and foodways. Garvin also writes articles on daily life under the dictatorship for journals like Critical Inquiry, Journal of Modern European History, Journal of Modern Italian History, Modern Italy, The Italianist, Annali d’italianistica, Design Issues, Food and Foodways, gender/sexuality/italy and Signs. Her research has been supported by the Rome Prize, Fulbright, Getty Library, Oxford University, Wolfsonian-FIU, Julia Child Foundation, CLIR Mellon, NEH, FLAS, AAUW, NWSA, AFS, APS, and other fellowships and awards. www.dianagarvin.com Twitter: @DianaEGarvin
Brian J Griffith is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University, Fresno. He writes and teaches courses on the political and cultural history of Italian Fascism, food and beverage history, the history of (trans)nationalism, and Digital and Public History. Griffith’s current research focuses on the history of industrial-scale winemaking and national identity in Mussolini’s Italy (1922-1945), the history of transnational volunteerism during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the history of neo-fascism in Italy between the 1950s and the 2010s.
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Relevant publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007); Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and as co-editor, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick, 2017), The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (with A.Patt, L.Levi, M. Mandel, 2019), and Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus, 2020). She is the co-editor (with A.Patt and A.Kramen) of a forthcoming volume of sources on “Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Germany.” During the 2022-23 academic year she was the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her current research focuses on “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees from National Socialism: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship; Her most recent publication on the topic of “Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” is included in the volume Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt (2023).
Paul Hanebrink is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of two books: In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944 (2006) and, more recently, A Specter Haunting Europe. The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (2018)
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she writes and teaches on interdisciplinary theory and historical method, the history of disability, the histories of gender and sexuality, and the histories of fascism and genocide. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005); Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011); Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017); Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (2018); and the forthcoming The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (2024). Her most recent coedited collection, with Chelsea Schields, is The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (2021).
Aristotle Kallis is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the School of Humanities, Keele University, UK. A graduate of the University of Athens, Greece, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1999. He has taught at the Universities of Lancaster (2003-2016), Bristol (2002-2003), and Edinburgh (2000-2002); he has also been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Padova, Stanford, and Şehir. His main research interests lie in the study of comparative/transnational/generic fascism; and architecture and urbanism in the interwar period, with particular focus on Italy and Rome but also within a comparative historical context. His recent book publications include The Third Rome: The Making of the Fascist Capital (2014); Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship (2014; co-edited with António Costa Pinto); and The Minimum Dwelling Revisited: CIAM’s Practical Utopia (2023). He is currently working on two monographs: “Fascism and Iconoclasm” and “Fascist Assemblages.”
Amy King is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Bristol in the U.K. She is the author of The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle (2024), which examines the memory of a 1973 attack on a far-right family in Rome and its role in the construction of far-right identity over the past fifty years. She completed her Ph.D. on the memory of Italy’s political martyrs in 2018 and holds an M.A. in Memory Studies. Her research also considers the construction of Fascist and antifascist martyr narratives in Italian American communities in the United States during Mussolini’s rule, and representations of Giacomo Matteotti as an antifascist martyr during the fall of Fascism and the construction of the new Republic. King writes and teaches on the history and memory of the Italian far right over the past hundred years and incorporates creative antifascist pedagogy practices into her teaching. She has held fellowships at international research centres including the British School at Rome and the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, and sits on the Executive Committee of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy.
Eric Kurlander is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Stetson University, where he offers courses on Modern German, European, and World History. HE completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University. His books include The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (2006); Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (2009); Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries, with Joanne Miyang Cho and Doug McGetchin (eds.) (2014); Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies, with Monica Black (ed.) (2015); Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017); and Modern Germany: A Global History, with Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Doug McGetchin (2023). Kurlander has held research and writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University’s Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. He is currently working on a monograph, “Before the Final Solution: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question” 1919-1941,” and an edited volume, “The Routledge History of Global Nazism,” with Jennifer Evans, Julia Torrie, and Jonathan Wiesen.
Silvia Lucciarini is Associate Professor of Sociology of Economic and Labour Processes in the Department of Social and Economic Sciences (DiSSE), Sapienza-University of Rome. She holds an M.A. in Economic Sociology and Ph.D. in Urban Studies. Her main research fields focus on the mechanisms of (re)production of inequality. She has taught at Lumiere University of Lyon 2, the CUNY Graduate Center, and the School of Law at the University of Nottingham. Her scholarship has appeared in several top journals, including International Review of Sociology; International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy; Cities; Policy and Society; Space and Polity; and Environmental Sociology.
Elissa Mailänder is a historian of gender, sexuality, and everyday life whose research focuses on violence, war, and mass dictatorship, particularly Nazism. In Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 (2015; 2009) and numerous articles she has worked on perpetrator history and the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of violence in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Her latest book, Amour, mariage, sexualité. Une histoire intime du nazisme, 1930-1950 (2021; English translation forthcoming), examines friendship, intimacy, and heterosexual relationships in Nazi Germany, highlighting the importance of mass participation and practices of everyday conformity to dictatorship. With her new collaborative project, “Trophy Photographs in WWII: An Interdisciplinary Transnational Debate,” she explores, together with fifteen international scholars, collectors, and artists, performative transgressions of soldiers in private photography from an integrated transdisciplinary and transnational perspective.
Renato Moro is a Emeritus Professor of Contemporary History at Roma Tre University. At Roma Tre, Prof. Moro has been Vice-Rector for Research from 2004 to 2008 and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Political Studies. He is now a member of the Ethical Board of the University. Since 2005 he has been co-editor of the quarterly journal Mondo contemporaneo: Rivista di storia. His studies concern the relationship between politics and religion in twentieth-century history, specifically Catholic political culture; the relationship between Italian (and international) Catholicism and Fascism; Catholic anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism; and the history of peace and anti-nuclear movements. His publications include La formazione della classe dirigente Cattolica (1979); G. Bottai–G. De Luca, Carteggio 1940-1957 (1989); Renzo De Felice. Studi e testimonianze (2002); La Chiesa e lo sterminio degli ebrei (2002; sp. transl. 2004); Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo (2004); Fascismo e franchismo (2005); Guerra e pace nell’Italia del Novecento (2006); Aldo Moro negli anni della FUCI (2008); L’immagine del nemico (2009); Una vita, un paese. Aldo Moro e l’Italia del Novecento (2014); Salire a Barbiana. Don Milano dal Sessantotto a oggi (2017); Il mito dell’Italia cattolica. Nazione, religione e cattolicesimo negli anni del fascismo (2021); and Storia di una maestra del Sud che fu la madre di Aldo Moro (2022).
Mary Nolan is Professor of History emerita at New York University. She works on twentieth-century European-American relations, on social and economic human rights in the age of neoliberalism, and on the gender politics of right radical populism in Europe. She is the author of Social Democracy and Society: Working-class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890-1920 (1981); Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (1994); The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (2012); and America’s Century in Europe: Reflections on Americanization, Anti-Americanism and the Transatlantic Partnership (2023). She also co-edited Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (2002); The University against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (2008); and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018). She is on the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy and has compiled “The Culture Wars Against Education Archive,” which tracks the current right wing attacks on education on all levels.
Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío is senior lecturer in European Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Between 2014 and 2016 she worked as Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for War Studies (University College Dublin), where she began researching the aims, dissemination, and influence of Nazi propaganda in Spain during the Second World War. She is an expert on the history of the Franco regime, particularly on the role played by the Spanish fascist party, Falange Española, in the construction and consolidation of the dictatorship and its relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Her last monograph, La Secretaría General del Movimiento: construcción, coordinación y estabilización del régimen franquista [The General Secretariat of FET y de las JONS. Construction, coordination and stabilization of Franco’s regime], shows how Franco was able to transform a radical fascist party into a conduit between state and society. This transformation, which entailed its necessary bureaucratization, did not imply, as previously argued, its complete de-politicization. She is currently working on a monograph on the development of Nazi propaganda campaigns in Spain and Spanish-German relations during the Second World War.
Roberta Pergher is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. Her book Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922-1943 appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2018 and in Italian with Viella in 2020. Her co-edited volume (with Giulia Albanese), In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, was published in 2012, and a second co-edited volume (with Marcus Payk), Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War, appeared in 2019. She is now writing a book on citizenship under Fascism.
Anson Rabinbach is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University and is a founding editor of New German Critique. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973. He has been a fellow at the American Academy, Berlin (2005) a Fulbright, Senior Scholar at Smolny College, St. Petersburg (2004), a fellow at the Institute for Twentieth Century History in Jena (2009), and a fellow at the Simon-Dubnow Institut (Leipzig, 2014) at the IFK in Vienna (2013). His research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe. Among his books are: The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War 1927-1934 (1981), The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (1991), In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (1996). He has published a documentary history of Nazi Germany, The Third Reich Sourcebook, co-edited with Sander Gilman (2013). His most recent book was Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History (2020).
Sven Reichardt is Distinguished Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. He has published widely on the history of fascism, the history of war, civil war and terrorism and on social movements and civil societies in late twentieth century history. He has several international awards and fellowships. In summer 2025 he will be senior fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
Mary Louise Roberts is the emeriti WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her specialization is women and gender, France, and the Second World War. Her books include Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-De-Siecle France (2002); What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2013); D-Day through French Eyes (2014) and Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (2021).
Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches classes on German and European history, comparative fascism, migration, and gender and sexuality. She is author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (2022), which explores the “family migrant,” the predominant category of authorized migration since the mid-1970s. She has also co-edited (with Ned Richardson-Little) a special issue of Central European History on the borders of East Germany, to which she contributed an article on how unauthorized migration through the Berlin Wall catalyzed new forms of policing in West Berlin. Her work has been supported by organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Council on European Studies, and the Central European History Society. She is using the privilege of tenure to embark on new research projects on right-wing environmentalism in contemporary Europe, the history of bisexuality, and a social history of the jet age.
Alessandra Tarquini is professor of contemporary history at Sapienza University of Rome. She is the author of several essays and books on the Fascist regime, intellectual history, and antisemitism, including: Storia della cultura fascista (2016); Italian Intellectuals and International Politics (eds. with Andrea Guiso, 2019); Sinistra italiana e gli ebrei. Socialismo, sionismo e antisemitismo dal 1892 al 1992 (2019); and A History of Italian Fascist Culture (2022). She is the scientific coordinator of the permanent seminar on contemporary history at the department of social and economic sciences at the Sapienza University of Rome. In 2021 she edited The European Left and the Jewish Question: between Zionism and Antisemitism.
Enzo Traverso is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth century. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for twenty years at the University of Piccardy, France. He has been a visiting professor in several European and Latin American universities. His authored several books, which are translated into more than fifteen languages, including The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (1994; 2018) The Jews and Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the Memory of Auschwitz (1995); The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003); The End of Jewish Modernity (2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (2016); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945 (2016); Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021); and Singular Pasts: The ‘I’ in Historiography (2022).
Aliza Wong is director of the American Academy in Rome and professor of History and Honors at Texas Tech University. She studied at Amherst College before earning a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is a specialist in modern Italian history with a concentration on southern question discourse, race, nationalism, and identity. Her book, Race and Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861-1911: Meriodionalism, Empire, and Diaspora was published in 2006.