Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
10 January 2025
Session VI: Fascist Empires
Pamela Ballinger, "Fascism and Imperial Excess"
Moderated by Darcy Buerkle
Responses by Giuliana Chamedes, Roberta Pergher
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
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.
Pamela Ballinger is Professor of History and the Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (2003); La Memoria dell’Esilio (2010), and The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (2020). Her research focuses on refugees and human rights, migration, seascapes, empire and decolonization, and borderlands. She is currently at work on two book projects: “An Intimate Sea: Sovereignties, Cartographies and Nature along the Modern Adriatic” and “Materializing Mussolini’s Mediterranean: Infrastructures of Fascist Empire.”
Giuliana Chamedes is Mellon Morgridge Associate Professor of History at UW Madison. Her first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (2019), explores right-wing religious internationalism, epistemic hegemony, and the reinvention of “Europe” after World War I. It won several awards. Book two (in process), “Unpaid Debts: European Socialists, the Global South, and the Struggle for Economic Decolonization,” investigates the movement for global economic equality. She is also writing a book with Udi Greenberg, Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is working with Monica Kim and a group of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists on a multi-year project, titled “The Global History of Austerity, Then and Now.” She has written about left and right-wing internationalism and the history of the global economic order in several academic journals and edited volumes, as well as in non-academic publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and The Nation.
Roberta Pergher is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. Her book Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922-1943 appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2018 and in Italian with Viella in 2020. Her co-edited volume (with Giulia Albanese), In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, was published in 2012, and a second co-edited volume (with Marcus Payk), Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War, appeared in 2019. She is now writing a book on citizenship under Fascism.
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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 VI: Fascist Empires
Pamela Ballinger, "Fascism and Imperial Excess"
Moderated by Darcy Buerkle
Responses by Giuliana Chamedes, Roberta Pergher
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
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.
Pamela Ballinger is Professor of History and the Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (2003); La Memoria dell’Esilio (2010), and The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (2020). Her research focuses on refugees and human rights, migration, seascapes, empire and decolonization, and borderlands. She is currently at work on two book projects: “An Intimate Sea: Sovereignties, Cartographies and Nature along the Modern Adriatic” and “Materializing Mussolini’s Mediterranean: Infrastructures of Fascist Empire.”
Giuliana Chamedes is Mellon Morgridge Associate Professor of History at UW Madison. Her first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (2019), explores right-wing religious internationalism, epistemic hegemony, and the reinvention of “Europe” after World War I. It won several awards. Book two (in process), “Unpaid Debts: European Socialists, the Global South, and the Struggle for Economic Decolonization,” investigates the movement for global economic equality. She is also writing a book with Udi Greenberg, Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe (under contract with Princeton University Press) and is working with Monica Kim and a group of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists on a multi-year project, titled “The Global History of Austerity, Then and Now.” She has written about left and right-wing internationalism and the history of the global economic order in several academic journals and edited volumes, as well as in non-academic publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and The Nation.
Roberta Pergher is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. Her book Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922-1943 appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2018 and in Italian with Viella in 2020. Her co-edited volume (with Giulia Albanese), In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, was published in 2012, and a second co-edited volume (with Marcus Payk), Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War, appeared in 2019. She is now writing a book on citizenship under Fascism.
+
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.
