Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that--at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities--Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Chair of the Department of Italian Studies and Professor of Italian Studies and History at New York University. Her areas of specialization include Italian film and visual culture, 20th century Italian history, Fascism and World War Two, and Italian colonialism and its postcolonial legacies.
Along with her numerous book chapters and articles, she is the author or editor of four books: Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-45 (Berkeley, 2001, 2004; Italian translation: La cultura fascista. Bologna: Mulino, 2000, 2004); Gli imperi: dall'antichità all'età contemporanea (edited, Mulino, 2009); Italian Colonialism (edited with Mia Fuller, New York, 2005, 2008); and Fascism's Empire Cinema: Histories and Journeys of Italian Conquest and Defeat (to be published by Indiana University Press). Her current book project is Italian Prisoners of War and the Transition from Dictatorship (under contract with Princeton University Press). She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEH, Mellon, and other fellowships.
