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Benedetta Carnaghi

Assistant Professor

CONTACT information and cv

Office: TBA
Email: TBA
Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Cornell University, 2021
Diploma, École normale supérieure de Paris, 2015
M.A., Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2013
B.A., Università degli Studi di Padova, 2011

TEACHING

As a multilingual teacher and researcher, I design my courses to foster a welcoming and constructive learning environment for all students, regardless of their background or major. At USF, I am thrilled to teach courses on modern European history, World War II, political extremism, and historical methods. I have previously conceived and taught seminars on spies and wartime humor, subjects that I plan to revisit. I deeply enjoy working with students one-on-one, and I relish the opportunity to supervise both undergraduate and graduate students. I am eager to supervise MA and PhD projects in European history and the history of the Second World War, and I would also be delighted to advise students whose interests go beyond these topics.

RESEARCH

As a historian of modern Italy, Germany, and France, I explore totalitarianism from below, examining the everyday experience of terror under authoritarian regimes. My first book manuscript—Agents of Betrayal: A Comparative History of Fascist and Nazi Spies, 1927-1945—tells the stories of the largely-forgotten spies who were tasked with enforcing Nazi and Fascist repression. I focus on low-level individuals rather than the leadership class, unearthing the lives of spies who were drawn from the very groups that Fascist and Nazi surveillance excluded and dominated. I argue that the regimes depended on such individuals to gain access to marginal spaces, but that this reliance on informers also made their governance more fragile—vulnerable to spies pursuing their own agendas. Based on two years of multilingual archival research in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and the United States, Agents of Betrayal draws on unexplored sources such as Fascist and Nazi police records and postwar court trials of convicted spies. It was supported by grants and fellowships from the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).

My second book project—Making Fun of the Fascists: Humor Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922-1945—conceptualizes humor as a form of resistance to authoritarianism. I compare anti-fascist satire in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Vichy France, exploring forms of humorous opposition that range from popular jokes to print publications and comic radio broadcasts. Throughout, I argue that laughter functions as a multifaceted and multilingual form of transnational resistance: a psychological weapon, a defence mechanism, a morale booster, and a means of countering the false propaganda of authoritarian leaders.