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Anti-Fascism Studies Network: History, Culture & Memory (AFSN)
About the network
Anti-fascism has played a vital role in the history of the global left, but its different variations have had an equally important role for broader sections of society engaged in defending democracy from fascism and the far right.
This network aims at creating an international scholarly hub for the study of anti-fascist ideas and movements from the 1920s to the present both to promote knowledge exchange and to articulate new methodological and conceptual interventions for the transnational/global analysis of the anti-fascist tradition.
Specifically, we hope to connect researchers and ongoing research projects looking at various aspects of anti-fascist histories as well as their circulation, persistence and mutations.
By adopting a spatial approach to anti-fascism’s iterations, we intend to explore the still largely unmapped spatial-social dimensions of anti-fascist memory alongside its historical intersections with parallel social and cultural movements, such as nationalism, anti-colonialism and feminism.
The Anti-Fascism Studies Network was founded in Manchester in May 2024 on the initiative of Franscesca Billiani, Kasper Braskén, Cristina Diac and Hugo García.
Research aims
Existing scholarship has mainly focused on the struggle against fascism during the interwar period in traditional European contexts, while neglecting its post-1945 periodic resurfacing in response to perceived social and political authoritarian threats and its role in non-European struggles, such as the colonial liberation and civil rights movements.
To address this gap, our approach stresses the interconnectedness of anti-fascism with other important issues and sources of identity, such as class, ethnicity, religion, and gender.
By exploring anti-fascist trajectories during the past 100 years, we strive to analyse how anti-fascist responses have been articulated within specific communities, such as exiles, dissidents and immigrant communities around the world.
We invite scholars to join the network to further explore related topics and to participate in organising conference panels, workshops and plan future research.
Our network asks:
- How did transnational networks come into existence and functioned?
- What role did they play in fostering forms of social cohesion and resilience and in articulating new geo-political alliances?
- How did they interact with their societies and shape the public debate on fascism?
- How and why did they decay, mutate and resurface? How did they cultivate a culture and a memory of themselves?
- How did they shape individual and collective trajectories and identities?
- How have anti-fascist ideas and practices been adopted and reconceptualised in different parts of the world?
Steering group
Francesca Billiani, (The University of Manchester)
I am a professor of Italian at The University of Manchester. My research focuses on the Fascist period, literary journals, modernism, history of publishing, and intellectual history.
I am the author of a monograph on the politics of translation in Italy (Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere, Italia 1903-1943), co-author of a monograph on architecture and the novel during the Fascist regime (Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime, 2019), and author of Fascist Modernism in Italy. Arts and Regimes is out with I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2021.
I am currently writing a short monograph on the geographies and histories of Public art in Italy in the 20th century.
Kasper Braskén (University of Helsinki)
I am a historian of global and transnational antifascism, internationalism, solidarity movements, and the history of international communism.
In my ongoing research project I study antifascist urban politics in Cape Town, London, New York City and Chicago in the mid 20th century.
Cristina Diac (National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, Bucharest)
I work on history of the European left, communist networks, transnational political movements, political radicalism in the XXth century, transnational history, the social history of politics, autobiographies and other ego-documents.
Hugo Garcia Fernandez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Hugo García is an associate professor of Modern History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, a member of the research groups Escalas and GIGEFRA and a former visiting researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the École normale supérieure (Paris).
He has published widely on the ideological and cultural dimensions of the Spanish Civil War and the transnational history of interwar antifascism, most notably The Truth About Spain! Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1922-1945 (Sussex Academic Press, 2010) and the edited volumes Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present (Berghahn Books, 2016) and Transnational Antifascism: Agents, Networks, Circulations (Contemporary European History, 2016).
His latest publication is the co-authored book Hispanic Utopias: A Historical Reader (Peter Lang, 2025).
Associated researchers
- Short Bio: Dr Guido Bartolini is a scholar of Italian studies and memory studies. He has published extensively on the representation of Fascism and World War II in Italian culture, and he has edited volumes and special issues related to memory, Fascism, and responsibility. He co-chairs the Memory and Literature Working Group of the Memory Studies Association (MSA).
- Research interest: Italian literature; cultural memory studies; memory theory; World War II; Italian Fascism; Italian colonialism; responsibility; complicity; implication; dealing with the past.
- Contact information: Guido.Bartolini@ugent.be
- Short Bio: Marco Bresciani is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Florence. He has received fellowships at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa), Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione (Milano), Remarque Institute for European Studies (New York University), the Centre de Recherches Politiques R. Aron (EHESS, Paris), the Centre for Advanced Studies in Rijeka, the University of Zagreb, the Institute for Contemporary History of Ljubljana.
His main research field are the political and intellectual of Italian and European antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, the political and social history of fascism, nationalism and conservatism in interwar Europe, with a special focus on the post-Habsburg Upper Adriatic, and on socialism and liberalism in the transformations and transitions between the 1970s and 1990s.
He has published several contributions on these topics, and among them a work on the antifascist revolutionary group of “Giustizia e Libertà” (Learning from the Enemy. An Intellectual History of European Antifascism, Verso Books, London 2024), an edited volumed on Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (Routledge, London 2021). - Research Interests: antifascism, antitotalitarianism, socialism, liberalism, Fascism, exile, French intellectuals, Habsburg empire, transitions.
- Contact information: marco.bresciani@unifi.it
- Short Bio: Professor Nigel Copsey is Professor (Research) of Modern History at Teesside University, UK. His major publications include Anti-Fascism in Britain (2017); (co-ed) Varieties of Anti-Fascism (2010); (co-ed) Anti-Fascism in the Nordic Countries (2019); (co-ed) Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective (2020); and (with Kasper Braskén) Anti-Fascism: A Global History (forthcoming).
- Research Interests: Historical and Contemporary Anti-Fascisms.
- Contact information: N.Copsey@tees.ac.uk
- Short Bio: Manuela Di Franco is an MSCA Fellow at Ghent University, researching Americanisation and gender in Italian comics. Her work focuses on Italian popular culture under Fascism, including press, comics, and censorship. She has held positions at the University of Michigan and Toronto, where she founded the TICS research group.
- Research Interests: Fascism, popular culture, comics, censorship, gender, Americanisation, translation, press, media, ideology.
- Contact information: Manuela.DiFranco@ugent.be
- Short Bio: Dr Guido Bartolini is a scholar of Italian studies and memory studies. He has published extensively on the representation of Fascism and World War II in Italian culture, and he has edited volumes and special issues related to memory, Fascism, and responsibility. He co-chairs the Memory and Literature Working Group of the Memory Studies Association (MSA).
- Research interest: Italian literature; cultural memory studies; memory theory; World War II; Italian Fascism; Italian colonialism; responsibility; complicity; implication; dealing with the past.
- Contact information: Guido.Bartolini@ugent.be
- Short Bio: Mara Josi is a Lecturer at University College Dublin, specialising in 20th/21st-century Italian literature and culture. Mara’s work reflects her interest in innovative research methodologies and is rooted in memory, trauma, and Holocaust studies. In 2024, her first book Rome, 16 October 1943 won the Premio Internazionale Ennio Flaiano.
- Research interests: Holocaust culture; Memory studies; Trauma studies; Anti-fascism and anti-racism; Women’s writing; Women’s participation in Resistance movements.
- Contact information: Mara.Josi@ugent.be
- Short Bio: Zoltán Kékesi is historian at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London. He holds a PhD from ELTE, Budapest. His recent book is Memory in Hungarian Fascism: A Cultural History (2023). He is co-chairing the Antifascist Memory Working Group at the Memory Studies Association.
- Research interests: (anti-)fascism studies; memory studies; Holocaust; Jewish history; Leftist internationalism
- Contact information: z.kekesi@ucl.ac.uk, website: www.zoltankekesi.com
- Short Bio: Máté Zombory (PhD) is sociologist, associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Currently he is finishing the book The Lévai Archives. Documenting History as a Response to Fascism. He is co-chairing the Antifascist Memory Working Group at the Memory Studies Association.
- Research interests: (anti-)fascism studies; memory studies; social movements; contemporary history; Leftist internationalism, social theory.
- Contact information: matezombory@yahoo.com
Ongoing projects
- Kasper Braskén (PI) “Locating Global Protest against the Extreme Right: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Racism and Internationalism in Multiethnic Metropoles”
(LGP) funded by the Research Council of Finland (Project no. 355478; 2023–2027) - Guido Bartolini (PI): “Facing up to the dictatorial past. Cultural memory and the responsibility for fascism in post-1990 Italian literature”
Research funded by The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) through the Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship project number 669165/1233723N.
News and events
New publications and essays
- The Helsinki Notebooks: Global dispactches against fascism and the far right.
- Marco Bresciani: Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe (Verso, 2024).
Upcoming conference
- Imagining the Anti-Fascist City: Contested Geographies of Resistance and Solidarity in Helsinki.