Benedetta Carnaghi

I am a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Durham University, where I am researching a project entitled "Making Fun of the Fascists: Humor Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922–1945." I started working on this project at University College Dublin, where I was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. This book project is a study of how humor was used as an instrument of political resistance against dictators in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Vichy France. As a historian of modern Italy, France, and Germany, I explore the history of totalitarianism from below, examining the everyday experience of terror under authoritarian regimes.

I was previously a visiting lecturer at the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, USA. I earned my doctorate in History from Cornell (2021), winning the Messenger-Chalmers Prize for the Best Dissertation on Human Progress & the Evolution of Civilization and publishing in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, and The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945. I have two Masters of Arts in Contemporary History from the Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne University (2012 and 2013), an additional diploma from the excellence program of the École normale supérieure in Paris (2015), and a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Padua, Italy (2011).