Giuliana Chamedes

Vilas Associate Professor of History

College of Letters & Science l Department of History

Hometown: New York

Giuliana Chamedes is Mellon-Morgridge and Vilas Associate Professor of European History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She completed an MPhil in European History at the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Her first book, _A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe_, came out with Harvard University Press in 2019, and won the Michael Hunt Prize in International History (2020) as well as the Marraro Prize (2019). She is currently drafting her second book, tentatively titled _Failed Globalists: European Socialists, the Welfare State, and the Challenge of the Global South, 1919-2019_.

Talks:

Anti-Fascism and Anti-Imperialism, from the Spanish Civil War to the Black Power Movement

This talk investigates the endurance of antifascism as a mobilizing ideology from the 1930s through the 1970s. It will suggest that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured, with minor changes, through the late 1970s the two varieties of antifascism were in dialogue but in opposition to one another—and both were mobilizing ideologies: they existed not only in the realm of ideas, but counseled individuals to take action in particular and circumscribed ways. The talk’s central contention is that these two strands of antifascism are central to understanding the course of modern European history and the enduring inability of the European Left to connect effectively with large numbers of activists of color on European soil.

Christian Identity and Europe

Between World War I and World War II, the Vatican launched a campaign against liberalism and anti-communism. After World War II, a new generation of Christian Democratic parties rose to power in Western Europe. To what extent did their politics align with the papacy’s? What was the Christian Democratic reconstruction project–and how did it seek to preserve Europe as a fundamentally Christian continent?

Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and the Radical Right, Then and Now

‘Fascism’ has become a buzzword in our political present. But what is its historical genealogy? And to what extent was the fascism and anti-fascism of the 1920s and 1930s comparable to the movements we see in Europe and the United States today? By providing an international history of fascism and anti-fascism in the past 100 years, this talk addresses both the past and pasts that do not pass.

Economic Crises and Welfare Chauvinism: From the Great Depression to Today

This talk tracks three great moments of economic crisis in the 20th century: the Great Depression, the 1973 oil crisis, and the Great Recession (2007-2009). It investigates how Europe and the United States responded to these conditions of crisis and how their welfare states were fundamentally transformed in the process.