Department of History

Giuliana Chamedes

Position title: Associate Professor of History

Email: chamedes@wisc.edu

Phone: 608.263.1826

Address:
Office: 4124 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4027 Mosse Humanities
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Office Hours: On Leave

Giuliana Chamedes headshot

Biography

I am a scholar of international and global history, with a focus on the place of Europe in the wider world. My research reframes the twentieth century around the paradox of internationalism. I investigate how the past century’s leading European internationalist movements (including socialism, fascism, anti-fascism, and Catholic internationalism) sought to grow their global reach, even as they failed to break free from exclusionary understandings of social justice and solidarity.

My first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019), explores how World War I galvanized the central government of the Catholic Church to craft its own variety of internationalism, which was intended to rival both liberal and communist internationalism. From 1918 up through the mid 1960s, the Vatican’s Catholic International made novel use of international law, public diplomacy, and new media to de-privatize religion, deepen the ties between Church and State, and weaken its hegemonic rivals. Drawing on new archival research conducted across Europe and North America, the project shows how the Vatican’s internationalist activities decisively shaped European reconstruction after both world wars, bolstered both fascism and Christian Democracy, and help spawn a transnational anticommunist crusade decades before the launching of the Cold War. It also proved unable to respond to the challenge posed by the Global South in the decades after World War II.

My second book, Failed Globalists: European Socialists, the Welfare State, and the Challenge of the Global South, 1919-2019, stitches together two histories typically told separately: the history of anti-colonial struggle and the transformation of state welfarism in Europe. The central question explored in the book is how socialist debates around redistributive justice—both within national boundaries and globally—shifted in response to decolonization and the rise of the North/South divide. The story begins in the immediate aftermath of World War I and concludes with the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Overall, the book argues that Western European socialists moved from a politics of welfare chauvinism to one that reneged on many components of the welfarist project, as countries like West Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, embraced austerity politics. They did so as part of a broader shift away from older models of economic justice, in a failed attempt to re-globalize socialism and respond to decolonization and calls to fight racism at home and North-South inequality abroad.

I am also currently working on an article (which may turn into a third book project) on the history of transnational anti-fascism between 1935 and 1948. In it, I focus on a number of non-western and African-American social movements that pursued a closely intertwined politics of anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-fascism from 1935, and how they responded to attempts to marginalize their work as anti-fascism changed shape and went mainstream in Europe and the United States, starting from the 1940s.

My teaching interests include the history of internationalism; fascism and anti-fascism; racism, imperialism and decolonization; and the history of human rights, social justice, and political economics. I encourage undergraduate and graduate students to embrace history as a discipline that offers critical insight into past and present, even as it provides a toolkit of translatable skills of use in the academy and beyond.

I am involved in the Public Humanities initiative at the University’s Center for the Humanities and I am currently starting a project that seeks to bridge the urban-rural divide and provide capacity building for underprivileged high schools in the state. I serve on the advisory committee of the Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice, on Faculty Senate, and on the university-wide General Education Committee. From fall of 2021, I will be Associate Chair of the Department of History.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia
M.Phil., Cambridge
B.A., Brown

Books

Selected Publications

  • Book – “Failed Globalists: European Socialists, Decolonization, and the Decline of State Welfarism, 1973-2008” (work-in-progress)
  • “Transnationalizing the Spanish Civil War,”Contemporary European History (July 2020): 261-263.
  • “The New International Economic Order, Utopian Realism, and the Recovery of an Alternative Vision for Global Governance,” Duke Global Working Paper (May 2019).
  • “Economic Development and the End of European Hegemony,” Journal of World History (commissioned article, forthcoming 2020)
  • “The New International Economic Order and the Recovery of an Alternative Vision for Global Governance,” Duke Global Working Paper (May 2019)
  • “Transatlantic Catholicism and the Making of the ‘Christian West,’” in The TransAtlantic Reconsidered, Susanne Lachenicht and Charlotte Lerg, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018)
  • “Pius XII, Rights Talk and the Dawn of the Religious Cold War,” in Religion and Human Rights, Devin Pendas, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
  • “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anticommunism in the 1930s,” Journal of Contemporary History 51,2 (2016): 261-290.
  • “Introduction: Decolonization and Religion in the French Empire,” with Elizabeth Foster, French Politics, Culture, & Society 33, 2 (summer 2015): 1-12.
  • “The Catholic Origins of Economic Development after World War II,” French Politics, Culture, & Society 33, 2 (summer 2015): 55-75.
  • “Catholics, Antisemitism, and the Human Rights Swerve,” The Immanent Frame (June 2015)
  • “The Vatican and the Reshaping of the European International Order after World War I,” The Historical Journal, 56 (December 2013): 955-976.
  • “La Giac di Gedda di fronte alla crisi europea,'” in Luigi Gedda nella storia, Paolo Trionfini and Simon Ferrantin, eds. (Rome: Studium, 2013), pp. 325-336.
  • “Cardinal Pizzardo and the Internationalization of Catholic Action,” in Gouvernement pontifical sous Pie XI, Laura Pettinaroli, ed. (Rome: École française de Rome, 2012)

Invited Talks & Research Presentations

  • “Catholic Internationalism,” Oxford University, Seminar in Modern European History, November 2020
  • “A Transnational Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle against Liberalism and Communism” Free University of Berlin,  Berlin, June 2020
  • “A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe,” Washington History Seminar, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, March 2020
  • “A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, March 2020
  • “Fascism and Anti-Fascism,” Annenberg Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, October 2019
  • “Transnational Solidarities, Neo-Liberal Economics, and the Chicago Boys in Chile,” Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, August 2019
  • “Christian Conceptions of Global Order,” King’s College, London, June 2019
  • “Modernization Theory is Dead / Long Live Modernization Theory,” Global History and Catholicism conference, Notre Dame University, South Bend, IND, May 2019
  • “A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe,” Center for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin at Madison, May 2019
  • “The Five-Star Movement, the Northern League, and the Historical Roots of Anti-Politics in Italy,” University of Wisconsin at Madison, Division of Continuing Studies, April 2019
  • “The New International Economic Order and the Recovery of an Alternative Vision for Global Governance,” Realism, Liberal Internationalism, History: Conceiving a New Research Agenda, Duke University, Center for International and Global Studies, Durham, NC, February 2019
  • “The Vatican Agenda after 1945,” Religion, Communism, and the Cold War, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, May 2018
  • “Catholic Internationalism after World War II: The Vatican’s Role in Early Postwar Nation-Building,” 25th International Conference of Europeanists, Chicago, IL, March 2018
  • “Catholic Internationalism,” The Study of Global Catholicism in the Modern Period workshop, Notre Dame, Indiana, February 2018
  •  “Democracy and Crisis,” The Crisis of Democracy and Global Interdependence: Aldo Moro’s vision and George L. Mosse’s Interpretations, New York University, November 2017
  •  “The Vatican’s Anticommunist Crusade,” American Historical Association annual conference, Denver, CO, January 2017
  • “The Pope vs. Wilson: How Catholic Internationalism Outlived the Wilsonian Moment,” United States Intellectual History Conference, Stanford University, October 2016
  • “Sacco and Vanzetti: What Can We Learn From Their Story?” UW-Madison, September 2016
  • “The Vatican, Nation-Building, and International Law,” Political Catholicism Conference, NYU,December 2015
  • “The Vatican, Religious Nationalism, and the Catholic International after World War I,” The Evolution of the Papacy: Modernity, Media, and Mission,” Northwestern University, October 2015
  • “Soft Power and the Vatican,” La Follette School of Public Affairs, UW-Madison, September 2015
  • “Ethno-Nationalism, Antisemitism, and Catholic Internationalism,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 2015
  • “Catholic Associational Life and State-Making,” Forms of Public Sociality conference, the University of Crete, May 2015
  • “Catholic Civil Society,” special lecture in Global Political Catholicism class, taught by Professor Charles Gallagher, Boston College, October 2014
  • “The Vatican and Catholic Internationalism,” University of British Columbia-Vancouver, February 2014
  • “The Catholic Church and ‘Christian States’ after 1919 and after 1945,” Theorizing Religion in Modern Europe conference, Harvard University, January 2014

Advisor To

Selected Awards

  • Yao Teaching Prize, Spring 2021
  • Vilas Associates Competition, September 2021-present
  • Mellon-Morgridge Award, University of Wisconsin, Madison, September 2020-present
  • Bloomenkranz Award, Center for European Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, September 2020-present
  • Book Prize (A Twentieth-Century Crusade): Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
  • Book Prize (A Twentieth-Century Crusade): Winner of the Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association
  • IRH Resident Fellowship, University of Wisconsin, Madison, September-December 2019
  • Fall Research Competition, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education,University of Wisconsin, Madison, June 2019
  • DAAD and Center for German and European Studies Research Competition, University of Wisconsin, Madison, January 2019-December 2020
  • First Book Award, University of Wisconsin, Madison, May 2018
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, September 2017-May 2018
  • Brittingham Fund Award for Seminar Series in History and Politics, January 2015; renewed 2016 and 2017
  • U.S. Holocaust Museum summer fellow for research workshop, August 2015

History Courses