Research interests:

• Fascism and neofascism
• Transnational memory cultures
• Commemoration and national identity
• Memory studies
• Oral history

Research overview: 

My first monograph, The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle, was published by Palgrave in 2024 with a foreword by Professor Alessandro Portelli. It offers an original and comprehensive study of the memory of the Rogo di Primavalle, a fatal arson attack on the home of a far-right family on 16 April 1973. Perpetrated by members of the militant left group Potere Operaio, this was the first attack on a domestic space during Italy’s Years of Lead. Through analysis of media coverage, books, and social media; observation of commemoration ceremonies; visits to sites of memory; and oral history interviews conducted by the author, The Politics of Sacrifice argues that memory of the Rogo has been instrumentalised by neo-fascist groups over the past 50 years. Drawing on contemporary theoretical debates relating to public and private memories, I connect the construction of a narrative of sacrifice to challenges faced by the institutional far right from the time of the Movimento Sociale Italiano in the 1970s, Alleanza Nazionale in the mid-1990s, and Fratelli d’Italia today. With the far right on the rise in Italy and abroad, the book identifies the characteristics of remembering that define far-right memory culture and investigates the role of memory in building support for the far right over time.

I am currently writing my second monograph, which will consider the memory of Giacomo Matteotti nationally and internationally over the past century. It will be published by Cambridge University Press. This builds on a journal article I published in Italian Studies, which examines the role of Matteotti's memory in the construction of the new Republic (1943-47).

I am also very interested in transnational memory cultures. My article 'The Battle for Influence: Memory of Transnational Martyrs in the U.S. Italian Diaspora Under Fascism' analyses commemoration of the Italian antifascist Giacomo Matteotti and the Blackshirts Giuseppe Carisi and Michele Ambrosoli, who were killed in New York, and proposes the concept of the transnational martyr. I argue that the transnational exchange evident in commemoration of both case studies added to the propagandistic power of the martyrological narrative of personal sacrifice by drawing meaning from geographical distance from Italy.

My PhD research examined secular martyrdom in 20th century Italy and into the present day. Martyrs have played a key role in the construction of Italian national identity, especially in the wake of national violence, making these stories crucial for our understanding of how the nation and its subjects understand their history and identity. 

I have published academic research on the memory of Matteotti, and co-authored a piece on the centenary of his assassination for Time magazine titled 'The Centennial of an Assassination in Italy Offers a Sober Warning for Today.'

PhD Supervision

I am currently co-supervising a PhD on popular consensus in Italy during the Fascist dictatorship, and another on Fascist continuities in Brazil under Bolsonaro.

I welcome applications from candidates working on the far-right globally, political violence (and the ways it is remembered), and memory studies more broadly.

Teaching

I teach on a range of units, including Memory (Year 3); Politics of the Past (Year 2) and my Special Field unit (Year 2) on the history and memory of the Italian far right over the past hundred years.

I am interested in creative anti-fascist pedagogy practices, and was recently awarded a Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship by the Royal Historical Society to run an antifascist zine-making workshop with Ioana Simion from Artizine UK. I reflected on the place of zines in a blog post for the RHS titled Towards a Creative Antifascist Pedagogy: Zine-Making in the Classroom.

In 2024, Dr Brian J. Griffith (Fresno State University, California) and I launched an online archive of neofascist posters harvested from the streets of Rome. Where Monsters Are Born provides in-depth academic analysis of each poster, deconstructing far-right propaganda strategies to help students develop their visual literacy. Lesson plans, a full bibliography and other multimedia sources are also provided.