CV:
Prof. Dr. Monica Fioravanzo is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Sciences at University of Padova (Italy), where she teaches Contemporary History, Journalism’s History and History of Contemporary Europe. She holds a PhD in Social European History at the University of Venice. In 2018 and 2021, she was a visiting scholar at the European Institute, Columbia University in New York, and in 2023 at Boston University in Boston; and for many years, she has been a guest scholar at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History as well as the Brentano Center, Freie Universität Berlin, also thanks to several DAAD scholarships. She is a member of the board of directors of SISCALT, of the Turati Foundation, and of the Centro di Ateneo per la Storia della Resistenza e dell’età contemporanea (University Center for the History of Resistance and Contemporary Age); she is a member of the scientific committee of the journal "Storia e problemi contemporanei" and the Spanish journal "Revista de Historiografía"; in 2024, she won the 20th Giacomo Matteotti National Prize with the book Lina Merlin, una donna, due guerre, tre regimi, published by Franco Angeli, Milan 2023.
Project:
My research focuses on the initiatives and contacts in the cultural, scientific, legal, and publicist fields that were undertaken between the Fascist and National Socialist regimes after the signing of the Rome-Berlin Axis within the framework of the Kulturabkommen signed on November 23, 1938. Munich emerges as a location of great importance in this regard, not only for its traditional ties with Italy but also because Munich was home to the Akademie für Deutsches Recht, founded in 1933 by the Minister of Justice, Hans Frank, which in 1937 created a section dedicated to German-Italian legal relations, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für die Deutsch-italienischen Rechtsbeziehungen, inaugurated in the presence of Arrigo Selmi, the Italian Minister of Justice. Also operating in Munich was the branch office of the Deutsche Italienische Gesellschaft, tasked with promoting contacts between eminent Italian and German personalities in the political and cultural spheres. The objective is twofold: to evaluate the operational depth, profundity, and results of this political-cultural collaboration, which in my working hypothesis, having involved eminent personalities from the world of culture, economics, and law, and having been based on partly pre-existing relationships and interests, was not necessarily just a propaganda facade or an empty container; and finally, to investigate the permanence and continuity, after the end of the war and in the subsequent decades, of the relationships, subjects, and studies that were initiated.