It’s out! 🎉
With a brilliant foreword by Alessandro Portelli, my book analyses how memory of the 1973 Rogo di Primavalle has been constructed & contested from the time of the attack to today (spoiler: Meloni is big on it).
Available in soft back, too!
Hey British Library, not to food shame you buuuuut I’m at the national library in Rome and I’ve just eaten a massive bowl of pesto and fagiolini pasta topped with pecorino and, with a bottle of sparkling water, it cost me £5
I’m striking because I spent much of my maternity leave writing job applications with a newborn strapped to my chest, trying to patch short-term contracts together (followed by panic attacks during the night feeds)
#WhyImStriking
Parents of 3 year olds who had absolutely terrible lockdown parental leave and then slogged their guts out to reach those long-awaited 30 free hours at 3, you are warrior heroes. Also, *%~!{*% hell.
I’ve just read the replies to Corbyn’s solidarity with striking lecturers tweet. This has made me laugh so hard I think I might go into labour. Lecturers on £80k! Overtime! Ahahahahahahh
#UCUStrikesBack
#UCUstrike
We've just made our last nursery payment and holy hell this feels like the mid-30s equivalent of paying off your mortgage. Can't believe we made it through... What an outrageous system.
The (digital) ink has dried... From Italian to History via Liberal Arts, my journey down Woodland Road stops at the History department where I'll be Lecturer in Modern European History from next summer on! Bring on transnational Fascism studies (& hopefully monuments stuff, too)
Feeling preemptively irritated about having to notify HR of strike days when the first week of term meant 13 hour days and the weekend. Do we notify them of that, too?
#ucuRISING
The contract is signed, the ink is dry, and I will soon be joining
@libarts_bristol
as a lecturer for the next year. I'm so looking forward to meeting new students, teaching new things, and being part of the team. Bring on November! 💪
PSA: You can get a free will with Slater & Gordon if you're a member of UCU. It was super speedy, took 10 minutes, and is particularly recommended if you want to reflect on your accumulated assets in your 30s!!!
Hope my daughter is happy with my laptop, that's all I'm saying.
Nothing quite like the realisation that over the holidays you have 72 presentations to mark, two new modules to write, and 45 sets of exam essays to mark to dampen any sense of Christmas spirit is there? Send mulled wine immediately.
* news! * I’ll be using the Royal Historical Society fellowship to run an antifascist zine workshop for students on my fascism then and now module, and to reflect on creative antifascist pedagogies
Society awards seven Teaching Fellowships, 2023-24 | RHS
I wrote something about Fratelli d’Italia’s memory politics and its efforts to reframe the way Italy remembers its experience of fascism (with a bit of Matteotti memory thrown in for good measure)
via
@ConversationUK
The contradictions strike action has exposed are extraordinary. WAM offers 7 mins to mark an essay, but we'll deduct 50-100% of your salary. If you work to contract, we'll make deductions. Tell HR every minute you've been on strike, shutup about overtime.
Every university has a WAM that calculates EXACTLY how much time they think we spend on marking (always infinitesimally small). That should be the basis of deductions. They should have to live in their own fiction.
Blown away by this book. It’s also been one of the most useful things I’ve read for my teaching/research. Not many things will have me getting up before the baby does to squeeze in some reading! I feel like I want to talk/read about it.Any good interviews with Mengiste out there?
A wonderful couple of days at
@AmAcademyRome
talking about political violence from the storming of the Capitol to the March on Rome. Heavy topics eased by exceptionally beautiful surroundings!
Well, the final signature's on the contract so it's official. The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy's 1973 Rogo di Primavalle will be published by Palgrave Macmillan at some point in the (semi-distant) future 🙌
Any tips on writing your first book? Asking for a friend...
I've been given childcare expenses support by the AHA to help me attend the conference in New Orleans in January. What is this wonderful, progressive and important initiative?! Never encountered such a thing on this side of the pond.
🎊 Publication day! 🎊 My latest article is published today in Memory Studies. It analyses transnational commemoration of Fascist and antifascist martyrs in the U.S. in the 1920s. With special thanks to the wonderful
@IHRCA_UMN
for the research grant!
The docs are signed! Massively excited to be spending four weeks as a fellow at The Wolfsonian in Miami this summer doing research for my next project 'Presente! The Afterlives of Italy's Far-Right Dead'. If you're in the area or have tips, let me know! 🌴
Lord. I've just found an app that 'drives' you around major cities while you listen to local radio.I'm currently in traffic by the Colosseo 😤 listening to Radio Kiss and wow the Italy yearning is STRONG. Wonder if I'll get cut up by teens in Smart cars?
Enormous thanks to
@BeineckeLibrary
for scanning a rare Italian political magazine from the 1970s for me. Blown away by the generosity/lengths libraries have gone to to support research in a pandemic. Now it's time to dive in!
PS. These subversive mags were good at typography
Hot off the press (open access!): 'A Martyr for the Resistance and the New Republic: The Uses of Giacomo Matteotti’s Memory, 1943 to 1947' analyses GM's memory as a bridge between partisans & Allies, & as a means to underline Italians' suffering under Muss
Delightful news in my last week of work: my next journal article has been accepted with minor revisions, AND (perhaps more importantly) the reviewer comments are rigorous, but positive and encouraging. Hip hip hooray! 🎆
Am thinking of organising a workshop exploring what an antifascist pedagogy practice could/would look like amidst the rise of the far right globaly. Would anyone out there be interested if I did...? *whispers into the void*
Friends! I’ll be talking about memory of Fascism next week with Giulia Albanese and Oliver Schmidtke. 5pm GMT.
Come and hear me mumble nonsense because I took too long a break over Christmas!
I reviewed
@DianaEGarvin
's superb new book, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work. Insightful & full of fascinating sources, it'll be of interest to those working on Fascism, gender studies & food history (or those into Baci chocolates!)
A former student has just emailed to say she’s going to write her MA thesis on italian secular martyrs after enjoying my final year course a couple of years ago 😭 what a start to the day.
I just got to pick my daughter up from inside her nursery room for the first time ever because of Covid. Going inside and seeing her peg with little shoes underneath was 😭
An uplifting morning on the picket line catching up with/meeting brilliant colleagues and bouncing my sign around as we danced along the march.
Strikes are a strange beast; brilliant to have social time and make new connections, but all framed within anger.
✊
Had fun in my Fascism class today pretending we were antifascists who had got our hands on an album of photos of Mussolini, which we wanted to analyse to draw attention to the aesthetic strategies used by Fascist propagandists. Top work by students!
Today’s the last day of my first (hopefully more to come?) full time lecturing job. It’s been the best, and I’ll miss it. A day/wk left until Jan, to wean me off. What a total treat it is to teach! My brain has buzzed throughout (apart from the baby bit, when it was mega sleepy)
Delighted to see my article 'Antagonistic martyrdom: memory of the 1973 Rogo di Primavalle' was published this morning in Modern Italy. Hip hip hooray! 🙌 If you're interested in political martyrs, uses of memory or Italian neofascism, give it a whirl.
Yesterday I had a little hospital trip in Rome (all fine). The nurses/docs were the kindest (& v. spiritosi), & the whole thing set me back €11. I asked if there were other charges, they said 'no, you're in the EU!' To be treated like an equal in healthcare...Frankly
#fuckbrexit
Got knocked off my bike from a pavement cycle lane into an A-road. Proof that for all the cycle infrastructure in the world, private e-scooters should not be allowed and should absolutely not be in the hands of people wearing noise cancelling headphones. Wildly irresponsible.
London friends!
I’ll be saying a few things about memory of Matteotti nationally/international after his murder at this event at LSE on 23 April alongside some other brilliant speakers.
Come along and have a look at some archival documents, too! .
The first Italian history book I ever read, day 1 as an undergraduate in Italian here at Bristol. I got the chance to tell Paul that when he came to Bristol a few years ago. What a lovely, lovely man.
Twitterstorians, any advice on promoting your (first) book? Do I just write to places asking if I might be able to come and talk about it? Is there a secret list of book hustlers-open-to-giving-talks I don't know about? Need to get this guy out there
It’s become an incredible interactive memorial. I’ve been here 10 mins and seen lots of people stopping, reading, reflecting. Events at the statue have done more to educate people in a week than the old thing did since going up in 1895.
Four job rejections in two weeks. Hurrah! One of the many things that suck about rejections is realising the days spent crafting and tailoring each application have evaporated. Might they have been better spent working on publications etc? Ugh academia, you beast.
Took this photo 8 years ago today (remember the Polaroid-effect filter?) when I came back to Bristol to scope out PhD options. Still my absolute favourite thing about the city 🌊🚣🌞
📣 Bristol staff and students! 📣
Next week,
@Footymac
,
@ECapecchi
and I will be talking about the meaning of the March on Rome, its memory in postwar Italy and the rise of neofascism, and the recent election of Giorgia Meloni and “post-fascism”.
Join us??
Flat as a pancake after 6 hours at the children's hospital last night (all ok now!). Would ideally rearrange lectures, but that just leaves the same amount to do in less time. Academia is a cruel beast.
Colston’s plinth. Overheard people here saying the statue has been thrown in the harbour. As someone who studies political attacks on monuments, this is quite something.
Ugh, I love the names of Italian pasta. Yesterday I encountered 'maltagliati' (translation: badly cut). Rugged rhombuses, the offcuts of tagliatelle or ravioli. Imagine being so good at something you can publicly label it as badly done and still flog it globally.
Anyone else just feeling really sad about strikes? I'm looking through the two new units I've just written and feeling really excited (and proud!) because they look top and then realising they'll be decimated by strikes.
What a joy to make antifascist zines with my Fascism students! Expertly guided by Ioana from Artizine, they responded to prompts from the course and produced amazing things. Mega thanks to
@RoyalHistSoc
for the Jinty Nelson fellowship funding. A career highlight for sure.
Travel booked for a fascinating conference (Political Violence: From the Storming of the Capitol to the March on Rome) at
@AmAcademyRome
in Feb! I'll be presenting on the memory of the Rogo di Primavalle, from the 1970s to the era of CasaPound.
(Covid, have a few days off pls)
Just did my first in-person lecture since (I think!) 2019 (maternity, covid and admin-heavy roles). We reflected on visual propaganda under the Fascist regime. I’d forgotten the buzz! Plug it into my veins. Where do I sign up for more?
Vice-Chancellor Peter Mathieson is paid a salary of £340,000, £42,000 in pension contributions, full expenses, a free five-bedroom house in New Town, & not one but two 24-hour chauffeurs. The Uni paid £26,000 to relocate his cat.
When challenged, he said it was "complicated."
In February,
@Footymac
and I had the chance to interview the brilliant Alessandro Portelli about his life's work. We recorded our conversation (with permission, of course). If you'd like to have a listen, you can do so here: A total career highlight!