The American Academy in Rome together with La Sapienza, Rome, will host a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 13, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. The conference, organized by the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), is based upon the landmark seminar that George Mosse held at Stanford University in 1963. The interdisciplinary conversations that took place over a semester in 1963 shaped the research frameworks of the study of European fascism.

Much has changed in the world since 1963, both in terms of far-right politics and historical methodology. The event in 2025 seeks to analyse and redefine “fascism” in the context of contemporary politics and research aims. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel will meet in Rome to consider the legacy of earlier research on far-right movements, and to reassess our current understandings of the concept in the light of current-day populist, anti-democratic, and authoritarian movements. The participants in the seminar are working on new fronts which reflect the new place that fascism, however it is to be defined, holds in contemporary politics, and to consider newly pressing issues about gender, the body, the geographic range of political movements and the challenges of comparing them across different political contexts. 

The organizers, led enthusiastically by Skye Doney (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Donatello Aramini (La Sapienza, Rome), have brought together historians working on modern and contemporary history from a wide range of approaches. They intend to produce an annotated record of the original seminar in 1963, and will prepare a transcript of the 2025 discussions to publish. For this reason, the seminar is closed to the public.

Full information about the conference can be had here: https://mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome/.

About the Above Photograph

On an occasion that prefigured the impending threats ahead, a legation of the National Confederation of the Fascist Labor Unions visited the American Academy in Rome in 1930. Three years later, Benito Mussolini would himself walk through the gates, tour the grounds of the Academy, and listen to a performance of American music played by a string quartet. In June 1940, Mussolini would take Italy into the Second World War allied with Germany. That September, the Academy released most of its staff members. And by the following June, the Academy locked its gates. Italy officially declared war on the United States in December 1941.

The leadership of the American Academy in Rome asked the Swiss legation to step in and protect its holdings, the grounds, and the buildings. Records show that in May 1942 the Swiss legation prevented the sequestration of AAR by the Fascist government. They stepped in again when German officers entered the gates by force and threatened the director in January 1944.