Joshua William Arthurs
Areas of interest
- Contemporary Italy and Europe
- Fascism and the far right
- Politics of memory
- Monuments and museums
- The classical tradition
- Everyday life in wartime and dictatorship
Biography
Joshua Arthurs specializes in the cultural, social, and intellectual history of contemporary Italy and Europe. His interests include fascism and the far right; the politics of memory, monuments and museums; the classical tradition, race and empire; and everyday life in wartime and dictatorship. His current book project, Forty-Five Days: Emotion, Experience and Memory after Mussolini, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines popular responses to the collapse of the Fascist regime in 1943. He has written extensively on the afterlives of Fascist monuments in contemporary Italy and contested heritage in a global context. He is also co-investigator for the SSHRC Connections Grant initiative Authoritarianism: Lives, Legacies, Traumas.
Professor Arthurs is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Vice-President of the Society for Italian Historical Studies, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Prior to his arrival in Toronto, he taught at West Virginia University and George Mason University.
Select publications
- “Vivere il fascismo: politica e vita quotidiana durante il regime” in Giulia Albanese (ed.), Il fascismo italiano. Storia e interpretazioni (Carocci, 2021), 237-253.
- “The Anatomy of Controversy, from Charlottesville to Rome.” Modern Italy 24.2 (2019), 123-138.
- The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy: Outside the State?, co-edited with Michael Ebner and Kate Ferris (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
- Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Cornell University Press, 2012).
- “Fascism as ‘Heritage’ in Contemporary Italy,” in Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe Veltri (eds.), Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe (Routledge, 2010), 114-127.
