Ángel Alcalde is Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He specializes in the social and cultural history of war, transnational history, and the history of fascism. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and was Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich. His latest monograph, War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. He has published widely on the Spanish Civil War, the Franco regime, and war veterans' history. His work has appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, European History Quarterly, and the Historical Journal. His recent research has examined genocidal and sexual violence in the Spanish Civil War. He is broadly interested in the relationships between war and globalization and the global history of fascism.
Rethinking the History of Fascism Globally (talk and discussion organized by PHE)
Speaker: Ángel Alcalde
Date: 6 July 2022
18:00 s.t.
Venue: K001 (Historisches Seminar; Amalienstraße 52)
What is new in the history of fascism? In the last decades, the perspectives of transnational and global history have renewed the vast historiography on fascist ideologies, movements, and regimes in inter-war Europe and throughout the 20th century world. In this intervention, I review these transformations of historical knowledge, critique predominant understandings of fascism in various historiographies, and discuss current research directions. I argue that increased awareness of historical interdependence and interrelation calls into question "generic" undestandings of fasicsm as a "European" phenomenon and leads historians to adopt an open-ended perspective on "fascism" as an empty signifier, which may allow historians and the public to better comprehend the long and wide history of the far-right.