Roundtable discussion: New Directions in Fascism Studies
- Event type
- Seminar
- Series
- Modern Italian History
- Address
- Online- via Zoom
- Speakers
- John Foot (University of Bristol), Diana Garvin (University of Oregon), Roberta Biasillo (Utrecht University), Paul Corner (University of Siena)
- Event dates
- Contact
- ihr.events@sas.ac.uk Email only
In conjunction with the centenary of the March on Rome in October 1922, this roundtable brings together scholars of Fascism to discuss the state of the field 100 years after the movement’s rise to power. All three speakers have recently published innovative work on Italian Fascism drawing on various methodologies including the history of everyday life, microhistory, food studies and environmental history. The roundtable will discuss what it means to study Fascism today, how diverse methodological approaches enrich the field and what the future holds for study of the Fascism in the coming decades.
Roberta Biasillo is assistant professor in contemporary political history at Utrecht University. She has worked at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden) in a FORMAS (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) project on climate change, cities and grassroots movements. She has been a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Social Security and a fellow at the LMU – Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich (Germany), where she started exploring Italian colonialism and imperialism. In 2020-21 she was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. Roberta’s research interests include property regimes, territorial and forest issues, natural disasters, modernization, nation-building processes, ecological imperialism. She has recently published (with Marco Armiero and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg) La natura del duce. Una storia ambientale del fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2022). MIT Press’s translation will come out in December 2022 (Mussolini’s Nature. An Environmental History of Italian Fascism).
John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History at University of Bristol and has published extensively on many aspects of modern Italy including football, cycling, radical psychiatry and postwar Italy. His most recent book is Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Diana Garvin is Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and has published widely on the history of everyday life across Fascist Italy and Italian East Africa including on coffee drinking, children’s toys, board games, and breastfeeding.
Paul Corner is Emeritus Professor of European History and former Director of the Centre for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes at the University of Siena. He is the author of a number of books, including The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy (OUP, 2012), Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism (OUP, 2009) and, most recently, Mussolini in Myth and Memory. The First Totalitarian Dictator (OUP, 2022).
Chaired by Dr Selena Daly, University College London.
All welcome- this event is free to attend, but advance registration is required.
