Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 44 minutes 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.
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.
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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.
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.
+
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.
