Hannah Malone is NWIB visiting professor 2023 at KNIR

Dr Hannah Malone, Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen, will be NWIB Visiting Professor 2023 at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR).

Malone's research uses architecture as a window onto the nature of memory and politics. She is author of a book entitled Architecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy (Routledge, 2017) and has recently completed the manuscript of a second book on Fascist Italy’s military ossuaries (sacrari) of the First World War.

As NWIB Visiting Professor at the KNIR, Dr Malone will investigate what happened to Italy’s Fascist Party Headquarters ( case del fascio) after the fall of Mussolini’s dictatorship in 1945.

Since the end of the Second World War, Italians have faced the question of what to do with the physical traces of the Fascist regime, and whether to preserve, demolish, alter, or renovate buildings and monuments of that era. Fascist sites represent a difficult heritage that it is too important to be ignored, but which also elicits divisive and painful memories. The roughly 5000 headquarters of the Fascist Party, or case del fascio, which were built across Italy between 1922 and 1943, are a perfect example of that difficult heritage. Having been created to represent Fascist party, they became redundant after its dissolution. While they lost their original purpose, they were recycled to serve new uses. In taking on new meanings in the light of an evolving culture and politics, they became comfortably integrated into Italian towns and cities. The treatment of the case del fascio is emblematic of how Italy has dealt with its Fascist past across the postwar period. Today, as the rule of a far-Right government fuels anxieties around the lasting legacies of Fascism, the case del fascio illustrate the creative and complex ways in which those legacies have been handled.

On 15 February 2023, Dr Malone will give a public lecture on her research at KNIR. This lecture will be livestreamed. You can register to attend through the KNIR website.

NWIB visiting professor programme

The NWIB (Dutch Scientific Institutes Abroad) visiting professor programme offers participants a three-month research stay at one of the affiliated institutes. The NWIB visiting professors can get to know the institute and its unique research facilities and international research networks. At the same time, the visiting professors contribute to the strengthening and broadening of the institute’s research and education programme. The programme is open to university (associate) professors and full professors from all Dutch universities affiliated with the NWIB.