Arts and Regimes in Fascist Italy

The research seminar will address the highly charged relationships between the arts and the Italian Fascist regime, and it will be divided into two main parts. In the first part, Prof. Billiani will discuss the notion of State art: to make sense of the relationship between arts and politics it is imperative to engage with a view of ‘the arts’ as a series of diverse but interconnecting fields rather than discrete entities. In this way, we can place the artistic fields outside rigid taxonomies, such as autonomy or heteronomy, modern and traditional, elitist or popular, pluralist or monistic, under the regime or within the regime; and rather explore their functioning mechanisms and political uses. In the second part, she will concentrate on the her use of digital humanities tools to illustrate precisely how such intersecting artistic mechanisms operate and offer a comprehensive and systemic view on the arts during the regime.

Francesca Billiani is Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester. She is the author of a monograph on the politics of translation in Italy (Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere, Italia 1903-1943) and co-author of Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime, 2019. Her latest monograph Fascist Modernism in Italy. Arts and Regimes came out with I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2021. She is currently writing a short monograph on the geographies and histories of Public art in Italy in the 20^th century and has been awarded a Leverhulme research project grant (2025-2028) to investigate contemporary Italian ‘new muralism’.

Please follow the event online through our VIMEO CHANNEL: the link will be soon published here.

Scientific Organization: Giulia Beatrice (Research Unit: Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture)