Here in the Department of History we are pleased to welcome Dr Roland Clark as a Lecturer in Modern European History. Roland did his undergraduate studies in Sydney, Australia, but completed his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and has spent the past few years teaching at Eastern Connecticut State University (USA).
His most recent book, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting fascist social movements in Europe. Drawing on oral interviews, memoirs and the archives of the Romanian secret police, Roland reveals the contribution of seemingly contradictory practices – deadly violence and charitable activities, intellectual and manual labor, political action and religious rituals – to fascist subjectivities in interwar Romania. Arguing against fascism as primarily an ideology, he focuses on everyday practices through which young men and women 'became fascist.' As he explores the rise and fall of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Roland places it in the broader political and social context of Romanian nationalism, 19th-century state-building and interwar European fascist movements.
Roland is currently writing about lived religion in interwar Romania, looking at responses to claims by a shepherd to have seen God and the mass healings and pilgrimages that followed. He is also working on a transnational history of antisemitic student violence across East-Central Europe in the early 1920s.
This semester Roland is teaching projects in HIST 106: Exploring History and HIST 232: The Historian's Craft.
Links
- Roland Clark
- Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015)