In the last few years, Fascism has had a remarkable reappearance in public discourse around the world, provoked by the global rise of the Far Right. At the same time, in the last two decades the historiographical perspectives of transnational and global history have contributed to reassess the experience of fascist ideologies, movements, and regimes in inter-war Europe and throughout the twentieth-century world.
In this seminar, Dr. Alcalde will build on this scholarship and on his new empirical research from global and transnational perspectives on the rise of fascism. His work proposes a radical reinterpretation of the history of fascism that helps us better understand, not only the past of the Far Right and fascism, but also contemporary phenomena. First, the paper will review recent transformations of historical knowledge in the field. Dr. Alcalde will conduct a critique of understandings of fascism predominant in various historiographies and discuss current research directions and methodological challenges. Second, he will examine the deep historical roots of fascism in the long history of the extreme right. Finally, drawing on the analysis of empirical sources, the paper will zoom in on the emergence of fascism in Italy after First World War, situating this phenomenon in a transnational and global context.
Ángel Alcalde is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and was Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich. He specializes in the social and cultural history of war, transnational history, and the history of fascism. His latest monograph War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Alcalde has also published widely on the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime, including the books Lazos de Sangre (2010) and Los Excombatientes Franquistas (2014). His most recent research articles have appeared in The Historical Journal and The Journal of Modern History. His current research focuses on genocidal violence in the Spanish Civil War and the global history of fascism.
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