Please join us for the inaugural Charles R. Ross Distinguished Lecture in Italian Studies at UC Santa Barbara on Thursday, February 6th at 5pm in the Wallis Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315). We are delighted to welcome Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU) who will be giving a talk titled “Race, Gender, and Population in Italy from Mussolini’s ‘Battle of Babies’ to Meloni’s ‘Ethnic Substitution.’ A reception will follow the talk.

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Established in 2024, the Charles R. Ross Distinguished Lecture in Italian Studies is named after Charles Ross, a resident of Santa Barbara and lifelong admirer of Italy and Italian culture. The lecture series brings eminent speakers in the field of Italian Studies to UCSB with the aim of highlighting innovative research that connects Italy to the most important issues of our day.

Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU) is an expert on authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and other fellowships and appears frequently on MSNBC and other networks. She publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter on threats to democracy in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, the New York Times bestseller Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback with a new epilogue, 2021), examines how authoritarian leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century.

Her talk will examine how Great Replacement Theory—the idea that White Christians are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, threatening the race and civilization—is now central to the platforms of far-right parties and governments from Hungary to Russia to Brazil and the U.S. It traces an Italian trajectory for such ideas, starting with Mussolini, who spoke of a crisis of White civilization years before Hitler came to power, and continuing through Berlusconi and looking at Meloni and neofascist thinking in Italy today. She will look at the effects on gender relations and argue that Italy has been a laboratory for far-right politics and policies that aimed to “save” White civilization by excluding immigrants, imposing apartheid-style colonial race laws, launching campaigns of national purity, and making motherhood central to female identity. 

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