Notes on Contributors
Ryan Anningson
earned his Ph.D. from the Wilfrid Laurier University–University of Waterloo Joint Ph.D. Program in Religious Diversity in North America. He then served as a postdoctoral researcher for the Upper Indus Petroglyphs and Rock Art of Northern Pakistan project and a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His most recent monograph, published in 2022, is titled Theories of the Self, Race, and Essentialization in Buddhism: The United States and the Asian ‘Other,’ 1899–1957.
Anca Diana Axinia
received her Ph.D. in history from the European University Institute in Florence in 2022. Her dissertation ‘Women and Politics in the Romanian Legionary Movement’ is the first systematic study of women’s participation and gender relations in the Romanian Legionary Movement. Her research interests include fascist studies, gender studies, feminist theory, and Eastern European history. She is currently a research fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest with a project on the relationships between fascism, gender, and the Holocaust in the Romanian context.
Andrea Germer
is professor of Japanese studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, and her current research focuses on historical fascisms, visual propaganda, gender, and contemporary animation in Japan. Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan (with V. Mackie and U. Wöhr; Routledge, 2014) and The Handbook of Feminisms in Japan (with U. Wöhr; Amsterdam University Press, 2025). She was the principal investigator in the project ‘Gendering Fascism Visual Propaganda in Wartime Japan’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG; 2018–2022), and is, together with Jasmin Rückert, co-editor of the volume Gendering Fascism.
Brian J Griffith
is assistant professor of modern European history at California State University, Fresno. He writes and teaches courses on the political and cultural history of Italian Fascism, food and beverage history, the history of (trans)nationalism, and digital and public history. Griffith’s current research focuses on the history of industrial-scale winemaking and national identity in Mussolini’s Italy (1922–1945), the history of transnational volunteerism during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the history of neo-Fascism in Italy (1950s–2010s).
Vera Marstaller
is a historian of contemporary history. Her research focuses on visual history, gender history, and the history of Germany and Latin America in the 20th century. She studied history, Spanish, and German language and literature. Since 2016, she has been a research fellow at the interdisciplinary research centre ‘Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms’ at the University of Freiburg. In June 2021, she completed her Ph.D. on ‘Gestures of Heroes. Home and Front in Nazi War Photography (1939–1945)’ (in German). Her current projects investigate heroised women in contexts of gender-based violence in Mexico and debates on style and gender in post-war Europe.
Meguro Akane
is an assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba where she received her Ph.D. in sociology in 2022. Previously, she served as a researcher for the Gender Research Library at Nagoya University and as a postdoctoral research fellow at Ritsumeikan University, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Her most recent article is ‘Karyūbyō Yobō Hō Kaisei Undō to shakaitekina mono: Joi Takeuchi Shigeyo ga hatashita yakuwari’ [The Reform Movement of the Venereal Diseases Prevention Law and social issues: The role of the female doctor Takeuchi Shigeyo], published in the journal Shisō [Thought] in 2021.
Toni morant
is associate professor of contemporary history at the University of València and principal investigator 2 in the research project ‘Gender and the Francoist Nation. Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives’ (PID2022-141082NB-C22), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. His main research interests are fascism from a transnational and gender perspective as well as Francoist symbology in Spain’s public space. He has co-edited The Right and the Nation (Routledge, 2023) and Reactionary Nationalists, Fascists and Dictatorships: Against Democracy (Palgrave, 2019) and has also published in international peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Contemporary History, Zeitgeschichte, Ayer, and Historia y Política.
Inbal Ofer
is professor of contemporary European history at the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. Her work focuses on gender and fascist political culture in Southern Europe; the development of urban space under authoritarian regimes; and the role of urban social movements in democratisation processes. Amongst her books are Claiming the City and Contesting the State: Squatting, Community Formation and Democratization in Spain (1955–1986) (Routledge, 2017) and Señoritas
Hanna-Leena Paloposki
is an art historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki (2012), and is currently a researcher/data expert at the Finnish Literature Society in the digital humanities consortium project ‘Constellations of Correspondence’ (CoCo), funded by the Research Council of Finland (2021–2025). Previously she has worked at the Finnish National Gallery and has long experience of working with archive collections. She has researched art exhibitions in international and nationalistic contexts, Finnish-Italian cultural relations, and the 19th-century Finnish art world. Paloposki has edited, and contributed to, many museum publications, including the scholarly web journal FNG Research.
Andrea PetŐ
is a historian and professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna; a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest; and a doctor of science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her works on gender, politics, the Holocaust, and war have been translated into 23 languages. She was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values and the 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights Award. Recent publications include: The Women of the Arrow Cross Party (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944 (De Gruyter, 2021).
Jasmin Rückert
is a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Modern Japanese Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. She completed two master’s degrees in Japanese Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Vienna in 2017 and 2018. Her Ph.D. project is entitled ‘Captured in Reflection: Japanese Photography in Manchuria’. It investigates propagandistic and vernacular uses of photography during the ‘Fifteen-Year War’ (1931–1945). She was a researcher in the project ‘Gendering Fascism: Visual Propaganda in Wartime Japan’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and is, together with Andrea Germer, co-editor of the volume Gendering Fascism.
George Souvlis
holds a Ph.D. in history and civilization from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). His research interests lie in the intersection of the fields of historical sociology and intellectual history. He co-edited a special issue of the
Rosa Vasilaki
holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Bristol (UK) and a Ph.D. in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France). She has taught courses and conducted research in a number of universities in Greece, Israel, and the UK. She is the founder of the research group ‘DISSENSUS–Social Research’ and a co-convener of the ‘Politics of Liberation’ seminar series which runs under the auspices of the German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation—Greece Office. Her empirical work revolves around the sociology of violence, whereas her theoretical work focuses on questions surrounding Eurocentrism and epistemological violence.
Caroline Waldron
is associate professor of history at the University of Dayton. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in History, with field concentrations in comparative labour, US and African history. She serves as the vice president for networks on H-Net’s Executive Council and co-book review editor of Altreitalie: International Journal of Studies on Italian Migrations in the World. Her recent articles include ‘“O Mother Race”: Race, Italian Colonialism and the Fight to Keep Ethiopia Independent’ (Zapruder World, 2017) and ‘Naming Rape’ (in Engendering Transnational Transgressions, Routledge, 2020).
Dagmar Wernitznig
is a senior research fellow at the University of Ljubljana for an ERC Advanced Grant, entitled ‘EIRENE—Post-war Transitions in Gendered Perspective: The Case of the North-Eastern Adriatic Region’ (https://project-eirene.eu). She earned her DPhil in history from the University of Oxford, where she was a postdoctoral and, subsequently, an associate fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. With an additional Ph.D. in American studies, she has also worked as a university lecturer for literature, culture, postcolonial studies, and gender studies in Austria for several years. Her publications can be found at: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8680-2957.