Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
11 January 2025
Session X: New Perspectives on Fascism
Austin J. Clements, "Everything Within God, Nothing Outside God, Nothing Against God: Religion, Fascism, and the Far Right in the United States"
Robert Corban, "New Order or World Order? New Perspectives on an Old Problem in the History of Fascist Italy"
Amy King, "Fascism Though an Institutional Lens: How Italy's Far Right Connects to its Roots in the Antifascist Republic"
Moderated by Elissa Mailänder
Response by Terrence Peterson
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
American Academy in Rome
Sapienza Università di Roma
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Leo Baeck Institute
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.
Terrence Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University. He specializes in modern Europe and European empires, with a focus on decolonization, migration, and warfare. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, examines how French officers sought to counter demands for Algerian independence by transforming warfare into an exercise in armed social reform. His current research examines the nearly seventy-year history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France to understand why migrant detention camps emerged as a quintessential tool of modern governance and why remain so today. Peterson’s work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Contemporary History, French Politics, Culture & Society, and the Journal of North African Studies, as well as in popular outlets such as War on the Rocks and the Mosse Blog.
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.
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In 1963, historian George L. Mosse led a landmark seminar at Stanford University, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries to analyze the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism, just eighteen years after World War II. Their discussions defined the early parameters of European fascism amidst the post-war era’s intellectual landscape.
Sixty years later, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 12, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel gathered to critically examine and redefine “fascism” in light of present-day populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideologies.
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
11 January 2025
Session X: New Perspectives on Fascism
Austin J. Clements, "Everything Within God, Nothing Outside God, Nothing Against God: Religion, Fascism, and the Far Right in the United States"
Robert Corban, "New Order or World Order? New Perspectives on an Old Problem in the History of Fascist Italy"
Amy King, "Fascism Though an Institutional Lens: How Italy's Far Right Connects to its Roots in the Antifascist Republic"
Moderated by Elissa Mailänder
Response by Terrence Peterson
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
American Academy in Rome
Sapienza Università di Roma
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Leo Baeck Institute
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.
Terrence Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University. He specializes in modern Europe and European empires, with a focus on decolonization, migration, and warfare. His first book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, examines how French officers sought to counter demands for Algerian independence by transforming warfare into an exercise in armed social reform. His current research examines the nearly seventy-year history of the Rivesaltes Camp in southern France to understand why migrant detention camps emerged as a quintessential tool of modern governance and why remain so today. Peterson’s work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Contemporary History, French Politics, Culture & Society, and the Journal of North African Studies, as well as in popular outlets such as War on the Rocks and the Mosse Blog.
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.
+
In 1963, historian George L. Mosse led a landmark seminar at Stanford University, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries to analyze the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism, just eighteen years after World War II. Their discussions defined the early parameters of European fascism amidst the post-war era’s intellectual landscape.
Sixty years later, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 12, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel gathered to critically examine and redefine “fascism” in light of present-day populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideologies.
