Roland Clark
Research Fellow (10/2019-01/2020)
Schools of Hate. Antisemitic Student Organisations in 1920s Austria
This project examines a wave of antisemitic riots that swept through universities in eleven European countries during the early 1920s. Between 1919 and 1923, antisemites violently campaigned for student control of the universities, attacked Jews, and supported extremist right-wing parties. I situate these riots within structural changes that took place in European universities after the First World War, analysing how the relatively sudden nationalisation and democratisation of universities charged everyday practices of teaching and learning with ethnic and political meanings. As sites of cultural reproduction, universities became hotly contested spaces where young people tried to impose their agendas on politicians and other elites.
I approach individual movements as local expressions of a transnational cycle of protest. Focussing on grievances, repertoires, political alliances, opportunity structures, and transnational flows allows me to reconstruct the entire cycle of protest in a coherent manner without minimising the importance of local contexts.
Roland Clark is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool. His research and teaching focus on the cultural history of modern East-Central Europe, with a particular interest in fascism, social movements, violence, gender, theology, and lived religion. His first book, Holy Legionary Youth. Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca 2015) approaches Romanian fascism by asking what activism meant to young Romanian men and women.
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