Office Hours
By Appointment
Education
M.A., West Virginia University
B.S., University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
About Me
Johnathon Keller is a historian of Modern Europe with an emphasis on Italy in the twentieth century and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regimes. His work, focused on the final years of the Second World War in Italy, explores Fascism in the context of the shifting totalitarian culture in Mussolini’s second regime, the Italian Social Republic, over the course of 1944. In particular, through the lens of the state militia, his dissertation explores the attempts by the Fascist state to get rural populations to conform to state power, with the wheat harvest of 1944 at the crux of the argument.
Through this case study, Keller argues that totalitarian cultures are not static, but rather dynamic and responsive to the circumstances that surround the regime and the populations they govern. The Fascist regime removing the illusion of their totalizing consent after the assassination of prominent Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile in April 1944 allows an exploration into what he terms the ‘spectrum of conformity’ and the dynamic nature of totalitarian political culture.
Research Interests
Twentieth-century Europe, modern Italy, fascism, nationalism, totalitarianism, political culture, and agricultural studies