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Dr. Arthurs will be a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge

Joshua Arthurs
Joshua Arthurs will be a visiting scholar at St. Edmund’s College, the University of Cambridge over May and June 2018. During his stay, Dr. Arthurs will participate in the workshop “What Remains? Fascist and National Socialist Antiquities and Materialities from the Interwar to the Post-war Era”; an inaugural event for a multi-year international research network on cultural heritage and far right movements. 

Dr. Arthurs will also continue research on his book manuscript, Forty-Five Days: Experience, Emotion and Memory after Mussolini. This project examines popular responses to the collapse of the Italian Fascist regime in 1943. In looking at this moment of upheaval and transition, he seeks to understand three overlapping problems: first, what the regime’s collapse revealed about the internal functioning and daily realities of life under a dictatorship; second, what conflicts and challenges confronted a society emerging from two decades of authoritarian rule; and third, how the dynamics of regime change have shaped subsequent memories and legacies. To this end, he is exploring case studies in retributive and ritual violence; revolutionary iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae; and denunciations and communal protest.