Current Research
My current research concerns two main areas. In the first, I use digital methods to explore the intellectual history of international cultural relations. The second is the transnational history of the cultural politics of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
Digital approaches to international and global intellectual history
Between 2017 and 2021, I pursued this topic through the project “The Culture of International Society.” Funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science (2017-2020), this project used cultural treaties – bi-lateral agreements among states that promote and/or regulate cultural cooperation and exchange – as a historical source with which to explore the international history of the culture concept in the twentieth century. The project’s final article, entitled “The Rise of the Cultural Treaty” and published in International History Review, used a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand why the use of bilateral cultural agreements grew so suddenly in the 1950s and 60s. (Learn more at the project page.)
In 2020-2024, I take a different approach to the application of digital methods to intellectual history in the project “International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History”. This project uses the tools of large-scale digital text analysis to explore thousands of documents produced by UNESCO from its foundation in 1945 to 2015, in order to understand how “international ideas,” the core concepts that define the terms of international debate, developed and changed, in particular when decolonization made the membership of UNESCO global in scope. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, thus project is conducted in collaboration with the media scholar Fredrik Norén and with Umea University’s Humlab. For more information please visit the project website.
Transnational histories of Nazi-fascist cultural politics
I continue to pursue themes related to my 2016 book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture. I hope soon to complete work on an article that explores fascist Italy’s involvement in the interwar institutions of international intellectual cooperation. This smaller project, supported by a grant from the Åke Wiberg Foundation, is entitled “Fascist Cultural Internationalism? Intellectual Cooperation in Mussolini’s Italy, 1925-1937.”