Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
9 January 2025
Session III: Fascism as Modernity
Enzo Traverso, "What is Fascism? Revisiting the Stanford Seminar Sixty Years Later"
Moderated by Dagmar Herzog
Responses by Renato Moro and Elissa Mailänder
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
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).
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 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).
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. 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 antisemitism and anti-Protestantism; and the history of peace and anti-nuclear movements. His publications include 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).
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.
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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.
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
9 January 2025
Session III: Fascism as Modernity
Enzo Traverso, "What is Fascism? Revisiting the Stanford Seminar Sixty Years Later"
Moderated by Dagmar Herzog
Responses by Renato Moro and Elissa Mailänder
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
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).
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 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).
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. 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 antisemitism and anti-Protestantism; and the history of peace and anti-nuclear movements. His publications include 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).
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.
+
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.
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.
