Biography

Roberta Pergher received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 2007. She has an MA in International Relations from the University of Denver, where she also completed a BA in Economics and Women’s Studies. Prior to being a Max Weber Fellow she served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. A recipient of various fellowships and academic honors, Roberta recently was a member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Her book manuscript, Fascist Borderlands: Nation, Empire and Italy's Settlement Program, 1922-1943, investigates how fascist Italy sought to conceptualize and implement untested forms of imperial rule after the First World War. In order to analyze the ways in which the Fascists sought to expand and consolidate what was meant to become a new Roman empire, she compares and contrasts the regime’s policies in the newly acquired northern borderlands and in the African colonies. She argues that the contradictions of Fascist policy in these peripheries reflect a specific interwar climate in which the struggle for empire was cloaked in and competed with discourses of national self-determination and radicalized notions of race and ethnicity.
Since her Max Weber fellowship year, Roberta has been an assistant professor at the University of Kansas between 2009 and 2012. She is currently an assistant professor at Indiana University. Her research and teaching interests are centered in the history of Modern Europe, in particular the history of Italy and Germany and include the topics of comparative fascism, colonialism, and borderland studies. She has published several articles and book chapters on these topics. Her co-edited volume (with Giulia Albanese), In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, appeared with Palgrave in 2012