Research

I am currently at work on a book manuscript examining how the German Nazis and Italian Fascists, with support from the cultural world in Italy, Germany, and much of continental Europe, sought to create a unified European cultural system designed to support the Axis’s bid for hegemony in the 1930s and during the Second World War. This is based on the revision of my PhD dissertation, “A New Order for European Culture: the German-Italian Axis and the Reordering of International Cultural Exchange, 1936-1943” (Columbia University, 2006).

Some of my central arguments are sketched out in my article on the Nazi-led effort to take over and reorganize European cinema: "'European Cinema for Europe!': The International Film Chamber, 1935-1942," in David Welch and Roel Van de Winkel, eds., Cinema and the Swastika. The International Expansion of the Third Reich Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 25-41.

In the longer term, I am also interested in researching the intellectual history of the world of international cultural institutions, looking at the concrete ways in which the classic rivalry between cosmopolitanism and local or national models of cultural identity has played out on the global stage from the late nineteeth century to the present.