We are pleased to welcome Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU) to deliver the inaugural Charles R. Ross Distinguished Lecture in Italian Studies!
Thursday, February, 6, 2025, 5pm Annenberg Room (4315 SSMS), Reception to follow.
"Race, Gender, and Population in Italy from Mussolini's "Battle for Babies" to Meloni's
"Ethnic Substitution" Great Replacement Theory—the idea that White Christians are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, threatening the race and civilization—is now central to the platforms of far-right parties and governments from Hungary to Russia to Brazil and the US. This talk traces an Italian trajectory for such ideas, starting with Mussolini, who spoke of a crisis of White civilization years before Hitler came to power, and continuing through Berlusconi and looking at Meloni and neofascist thinking in Italy today. I look at the effects on gender relations and argue that Italy has been a laboratory for far-right politics and policies that aimed to "save" White civilization by excluding immigrants, imposing apartheid-style colonial race laws, launching campaigns of national purity, and making motherhood central to female identity.
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and other fellowships and appears frequently on MSNBC and other networks. She publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter on threats to democracy in the U.S. and abroad.
Her latest book, the New York Times bestseller Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback with a new epilogue, 2021), examines how authoritarian leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century.
She is a consultant for television and film productions, including the Academy Award-winning 2022 movie Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro, 2022), and the Netflix docuseries Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial (Joe Berlinguer, 2024).
She testified to the House Jan. 6 Committee and advises civil society organizations that face autocratic interferences in the US and around the world. As an advisor to Protect Democracy, she was part of a 2019 Amicus Curiae brief in the context of PEN America’s lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attempts to stifle press freedoms. And in January 2024 she co-authored an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court on the January 6 insurrection seen through the lens of the history of international anti-democratic violence.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan