Speaker series focuses on Italian Fascism in a global context

Diana Garvin, an Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon, taught RL 470 Fascism and Neo-Fascism during Spring 2020 as a 2019–20 OHC Wulf Professor in the Humanities. Garvin had planned to invite guest speakers to address these topics, but the COVID pandemic dashed those plans.

In 2023 Garvin will present the “Italian Fascism in Global Context” speaker series, bringing together three leading scholars of Fascism, Neo-Fascism, gender, and migration to ask a series of critical questions: Why are so many strongmen women? How did Fascist imperialism set the stage for later autocracies? What happens when Fascism travels?   

According to Garvin, “Today, we need to understand how Fascism, of Italian origins, operates on a global stage. Historians often point to Benito Mussolini’s regime as the first Fascism, an archetype for far-right regimes to come. In October 2022, Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister of Italy.  Her party, Fratelli d’Italia, will lead the most conservative coalition to hold power since the Blackshirts marched on Rome. From the dark dawn of Fascism in 1922 to the Neo-Fascist resurgence in 2022, old themes repeat in new ways. Calls to increase white birthrates and promote “traditional” families parallel demands to restrict gay rights and immigration across the Mediterranean passage.  Sadly, strongman politics are on the rise in many nations, and slogans like “Italians first” have a new, global resonance.” 

On Thursday, January 26, 2023 Pamela Ballinger, Professor of History and the Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights at the University of Michigan will give a talk titled “Materializing Mare Nostrum: Mussolini’s Mediterranean Mobilizations” at 4 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Ballinger is the author of The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (2020).

Mia Fuller, the Gladyce Arata Terrill Distinguished [Associate] Professor of Italian Studies at UC-Berkeley, will give a talk (title TBA) on Wednesday, March 8 at 4:30 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Fuller is a cultural anthropologist and urban-architectural historian whose research concerns the interplays of physical space with political power.

In spring term Emma Bond, College Lecturer in Italian at Oxford University, will give a talk titled “Rusted, discarded, fake, scratched: Broken Objects as Agents of Anti-Colonial Repair in Museums and Literature” on Wednesday, April 19 at 5:30 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Bond is a scholar of modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture. She is particularly interested in studying Italian cultures from transnational and comparative perspectives 

These talks are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Diana Garvin, dgarvin@uoregon.edu