Global Friday Presents
Dr. Robert Ventresca
Academic Dean and Professor of History
Kings University College at Western University
and
Dr. Jacopo Pili

Abstract: The rise of Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, the country’ first female prime minister and leader of one of the most far-right parties in the history of the post-fascist Republic, has drawn worldwide concern about the return of Fascism to Italy. But is Giorgia Meloni a Fascist? Does the recent electoral success of far-right parties signal a decisive rejection of liberal democratic norms and of the so-called ‘anti-Fascist paradigm’ that has defined Italian political life and national identity since the fall of Mussolini? Historians Jacopo Pili and Robert Ventresca join Global Fridays to help us historicize the recent resurgence of Italy’s far-right. They examine how the legacy of fascism continues to haunt the country’s governing structures as well as popular memory, but in more complex ways than is commonly understood. Seen through a historical lens, the rise to power of the far-right does not signal a return to fascism so much as the adaptation by far-right leaders like Giorgio Meloni of a coherent if historically flawed narrative of Italy’s post-Fascist history.

Speaker's Bios: Dr. Robert Ventresca is currently a professor of History at King's University College at Western University in London, Ontario Canada. He is a Member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and also serves on the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
He earned his doctorate in modern European history from the University of Toronto in 2000.
Dr. Ventresca's research and writing straddle various areas of history and contemporary issues. He has been published on a diverse range of topics, from popular religious devotion in the early Cold War, to the contours of modern Catholic social thought, to the history of papal diplomacy, to most recently, the Catholic Church and the Holocaust.
His current research, teaching, and public scholarship interrogate Catholicism's role and responses to Nazism-Fascism in the era of the Holocaust. This work contributes to a growing comparative scholarship on the role that religion and religious institutions played in war and genocide in the 20th century.
Jacopo Pili is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) and Project Manager of the ITHACA Project, funded by the European Commission through the HORIZON2020 program. Jacopo is currently teaching the Global Intellectual History course at the University of Roma Tre and the Global Fascisms seminar at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He received his Ph.D at the University of Leeds (UK) in 2020 and his first monograph, Anglophobia in Fascist Italy, was published by Manchester University Press in 2022. His research interests include Italian military history, the history of Fascism and humanitarian action during the Second World War.

Online: Zoom Webinar
Passcode: 765374
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