Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
11 January 2025
Session VII: Fascism and Nationalism
Eric Kurlander, "The Romantic Roots of Fascist Nationalism"
Moderated by Mary Nolan
Responses by Donatello Aramini, Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío
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
Mary Nolan is Professor of History emerita at New York University. She works on twentieth-century European-American relations, on social and economic human rights in the age of neoliberalism, and on the gender politics of right radical populism in Europe. She is the author of The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (2012); and America’s Century in Europe: Reflections on Americanization, Anti-Americanism and the Transatlantic Partnership (2023). She is on the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy and has compiled “The Culture Wars Against Education Archive,” which tracks the current right wing attacks on education on all levels.
Eric Kurlander is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Stetson University. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University. His books include The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (2006); Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (2009); Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries, with Joanne Miyang Cho and Doug McGetchin (eds.) (2014); Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies, with Monica Black (ed.) (2015); Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017); and Modern Germany: A Global History, with Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Doug McGetchin (2023). Kurlander has held research and writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University’s Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. He is currently working on a monograph, “Before the Final Solution: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question” 1919-1941,” and an edited volume, “The Routledge History of Global Nazism,” with Jennifer Evans, Julia Torrie, and Jonathan Wiesen.
Donatello Aramini is Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the Department of Political Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. He was visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2023 and Mosse-Friends Fellow in 2011 and 2022 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the editorial board of Mondo contemporaneo. Rivista di storia and Giornale di storia. He is the author of the books George L. Mosse, l’Italia e gli storici (2010) and La rivoluzione nazionale: I nazionalisti, il fascismo e la fine dello Stato liberale (1919-1927) (2023). He has co-edited with Skye Doney and Laura Ciglioni the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History “George L. Mosse, Nationalism and the Crises of Liberal Democracies” (2021) and the book La contemporaneità del passato. Studi in onore di Renato Moro (2021). In 2023 co-edited a special issue of Mondo contemporaneo on the centenary of the March on Rome. He is currently working on a monograph on the myth of Rome in Fascist Italy.
Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío is senior lecturer in European Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her last monograph, La Secretaría General del Movimiento: construcción, coordinación y estabilización del régimen franquista [The General Secretariat of FET y de las JONS. Construction, coordination and stabilization of Franco’s regime], shows how Franco was able to transform a radical fascist party into a conduit between state and society. She is currently working on a monograph on the development of Nazi propaganda campaigns in Spain and Spanish-German relations during the Second World War.
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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 VII: Fascism and Nationalism
Eric Kurlander, "The Romantic Roots of Fascist Nationalism"
Moderated by Mary Nolan
Responses by Donatello Aramini, Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío
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
Mary Nolan is Professor of History emerita at New York University. She works on twentieth-century European-American relations, on social and economic human rights in the age of neoliberalism, and on the gender politics of right radical populism in Europe. She is the author of The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (2012); and America’s Century in Europe: Reflections on Americanization, Anti-Americanism and the Transatlantic Partnership (2023). She is on the steering committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy and has compiled “The Culture Wars Against Education Archive,” which tracks the current right wing attacks on education on all levels.
Eric Kurlander is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Stetson University. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University. His books include The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (2006); Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (2009); Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries, with Joanne Miyang Cho and Doug McGetchin (eds.) (2014); Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies, with Monica Black (ed.) (2015); Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017); and Modern Germany: A Global History, with Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Doug McGetchin (2023). Kurlander has held research and writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University’s Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. He is currently working on a monograph, “Before the Final Solution: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question” 1919-1941,” and an edited volume, “The Routledge History of Global Nazism,” with Jennifer Evans, Julia Torrie, and Jonathan Wiesen.
Donatello Aramini is Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the Department of Political Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. He was visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2023 and Mosse-Friends Fellow in 2011 and 2022 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the editorial board of Mondo contemporaneo. Rivista di storia and Giornale di storia. He is the author of the books George L. Mosse, l’Italia e gli storici (2010) and La rivoluzione nazionale: I nazionalisti, il fascismo e la fine dello Stato liberale (1919-1927) (2023). He has co-edited with Skye Doney and Laura Ciglioni the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History “George L. Mosse, Nationalism and the Crises of Liberal Democracies” (2021) and the book La contemporaneità del passato. Studi in onore di Renato Moro (2021). In 2023 co-edited a special issue of Mondo contemporaneo on the centenary of the March on Rome. He is currently working on a monograph on the myth of Rome in Fascist Italy.
Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío is senior lecturer in European Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her last monograph, La Secretaría General del Movimiento: construcción, coordinación y estabilización del régimen franquista [The General Secretariat of FET y de las JONS. Construction, coordination and stabilization of Franco’s regime], shows how Franco was able to transform a radical fascist party into a conduit between state and society. She is currently working on a monograph on the development of Nazi propaganda campaigns in Spain and Spanish-German relations during the Second World War.
+
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.
