Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 9 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
10 January 2025
Session IV: The New Fascist Body
Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body"
Moderated by Alessandra Tarquini
Responses by Lorenzo Benadusi, Darcy Buerkle
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
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.
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).
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.
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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.
The 2025 seminar revisited earlier scholarly interpretations of far-right movements, initiated by figures like Mosse a generation earlier, while also reinterpreting fascism through the lens of current geopolitical and cultural realities. This approach expanded upon and revised existing understandings of the concept, while fostering new insights and historiographical directions. Following the seminar, the Mosse Program plans to publish two companion volumes: Fascism Then, featuring annotated proceedings from the original 1963 seminar, and Fascism Now, based on the 2025 seminar.
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
10 January 2025
Session IV: The New Fascist Body
Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body"
Moderated by Alessandra Tarquini
Responses by Lorenzo Benadusi, Darcy Buerkle
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
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.
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).
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.
+
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.
The 2025 seminar revisited earlier scholarly interpretations of far-right movements, initiated by figures like Mosse a generation earlier, while also reinterpreting fascism through the lens of current geopolitical and cultural realities. This approach expanded upon and revised existing understandings of the concept, while fostering new insights and historiographical directions. Following the seminar, the Mosse Program plans to publish two companion volumes: Fascism Then, featuring annotated proceedings from the original 1963 seminar, and Fascism Now, based on the 2025 seminar.
