Marco Bresciani, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Biography

I am Associate Professor at the University of Florence, Department of Political and Social Sciences. I received my PhD in Contemporary History at the University of Pisa (2006), where he was a post-doc researcher from 2010 to 2014. He was also a fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), at the Remarque Institute (New York University), at the Centre de Recherches Politiques R. Aron (Ecole Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), at the Center for Advanced Studies (University of Rijeka), at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Zagreb, at the University of Verona.

My main research field has long been the political and intellectual of Italian and European antifascism and anti-totalitarianism. I published several contributions on these topics, and among them a work focusing on the antifascist revolutionary group of “Giustizia e Libertà”, its exile experience in Paris in the 1930s and its strong connections with the French and European interwar culture. Meanwhile, I have turned to the political and social history of fascism, nationalism and conservatism in interwar Europe, with a special focus on the post-Habsburg Upper Adriatic. Most recently, I have started a new project concerning the local impact of globalization in European peripheries with special attention to the intellectual and expert networks in the political and economic reconfigurations. One of the main issues at the core of these two projects are political and economic transitions and transformations of the relationship between state and civil society at different critical contingencies of the twentieth-century European history (like 1917-1923 and 1989-1994).

Visiting Fellowship August-September 2024

Visiting Fellowship 9.- 13.12. 2024

Motivation

I am delighted to join the Institute for Contemporary History. Although I have been several times in Ljubljana for research, conferences, and vacations, this fellowship is a great opportunity to foster conversations with colleagues from the Institute and discuss common research interests and long-term forms of cooperation. During this fellowship I plan to work on my current main project, that is the social, economic, intellectual, and political history of late Habsburg and post-Habsburg Trieste and its broader regional, Mitteleuropean and global connections and contexts. I will thus continue engaging with comparative studies of post-1918 state transitions, especially in terms of social and economic reconfigurations in European and global contexts, while making some further research in the Slovenian archives and libraries. Furthermore, I will keep discussions about my ongoing project on the intellectual history of the interwar Europe, starting from my previous research on fascism and antifascism, as potential field for scientific collaborations with researchers from the Institute, notably within the framework of a COST Action. Finally, further cooperation between scientific and academic institutions of Ljubljana and the University of Florence will be considered and discussed.

List of publications (a selection)

Learning from the Enemy. An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe, Verso Books, London 2024

Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe, edited volume by M. Bresciani, Fascism and Far Right Series, Routledge, London 2021

Imperial Collapse, Narratives of Loss, Reconfigured Globalization: Trieste and Danzig After the Great War (with K. Richter), “Journal of Modern History”, 95, 3, September 2023, pp. 557-595

Fascist Ideas, Practices, and Networks of “Empire”: Rethinking Interwar Italy as Post-Habsburg History, “Philosophy and Social Criticism”, 50, 4, 2023, pp. 584-596

Italy, in R. Clark, T. Grady (eds.), European Fascist Movements. A Sourcebook, Routledge, London 2023, pp. 25-43

Becoming Antifascist: Uncertainties, Dilemmas, Contradictions vis-à-vis Italian Fascism, in G. Albanese (ed.), Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism, Routledge, London 2022, pp.

Between Nation and Empire: The Post-Habsburg Adriatic Question and the Fascist Idea of Europe in B. Olschowsky, P. Juszkiewicz, J. Rydel (eds.) Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War, DeGruyter, Oldenbourg, 2021, pp. 171-182

The Battle for Post-Habsburg Trieste: State Transition, Social Unrest and Political Radicalism (1918-1923), “Austrian History Yearbook”, 2021, pp. 182-200

Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Idea of Nation: Italian Historiography and Public Debate since the 1980s, “Contemporary European History”, 30, 1, February 2021, pp. 111-123

Conservative and radical dynamics of Italian fascism: an (East) European perspective (1918-1938), in M. Bresciani (ed.), Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe, Routledge, London 2021, pp. 68-94