Ben Martin writes and teaches on the history of twentieth-century international cultural relations. His book, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture
(Harvard University Press, 2016) tells the story of how the German-Italian Axis sought to create a "New Order" in European cultural life in the 1930s and during WWII.
LATEST:
New article
My latest article has been published in the proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries Conference. Entitled “Keeping it simple,” it is a short presentation of my use of digital text analysis to explore ideas of culture in state-to-state cultural agreements.
Book prize!
My book has been awarded the 2020 Culbert Family Book Prize for Publications on Media History dealing with Propaganda, Mass Persuasion and Public Opinion, of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST). The prize, which honors the life and work of the path-breaking media historian David Culbert, is awarded by the IAMHIST Council and the editorial board of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
Two talks in Helsinki
On February 27, 2020, I presented two papers at the University of Helsinki. First, I gave a public guest lecture in the Centre for Nordic Studies’ course Interwar Modernities, called “Modernism and Modernity in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: A Reevaluation in Three Episodes”
Then, I went to Helsinki’s Digital Humanities Research Seminar and presented a paper entitled “What was the ‘culture’ of cultural treaties?: Digital text analysis for the intellectual history of 20th-century international relations”
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Nov 4, 2019: I am delighted to report that the Swedish Research Council (VR) has awarded me a three-year research grant for my new project, International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History. The project, which I will run in cooperation with Humlab Umeå and in which I am joined by the media scholar Fredrik Norén, will begin in Spring 2020. More on this soon!
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On November 14 I presented a paper from my on-going research at the seminar at Uppsala University’s Department of History of Science and Ideas. The paper is about using digital text analysis to study the international history of the culture concept.
June 2019: Two new articles!
First, my article on how fascist Italian intellectuals promoted their arts policy internationally is now out (and free to download): “Fascist Italy’s Illiberal Cultural Networks: Culture, Corporatism and International Relations,” in L. Cerasi, ed., Genealogie e geografie dell’anti-democrazia nella crisi europea degli anni Trenta (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2019): 137-158.
And…my article on the role of visual arts in Nazi Germany’s plans for a cultural new order was also recently published: “The Art of Nazi International Networking: The Visual Arts in the Rhetoric and Reality of Hitler’s European New Order,” in M. Björkman, P. Lundell, and S. Widmalm, eds., Intellectual Collaboration with the Third Reich: Treason or Reason? (London: Routledge, 2019).
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Notes on talks and conferences I’ve presented in are listed in the blog…
Listen to Ben's interview on the book with the New Books in History Network.