Dr Amy King

Research interests:

• Fascism and neofascism
• Transnational memory cultures and commemorative practices
• Memory studies
• Oral history
• Antifascist pedagogy

Research overview: 

My first monograph, The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle, was published by Palgrave in 2024 with a foreword by Professor Alessandro Portelli. It analyses the memory of the Rogo di Primavalle, a fatal arson attack on the home of a far-right family on 16 April 1973 perpetrated by members of the militant left group Potere Operaio. Through analysis of media coverage, books, and social media; observation of commemoration ceremonies; visits to sites of memory; and oral history interviews, The Politics of Sacrifice draws on contemporary theoretical debates relating to public and private memories to connect the construction of a narrative of sacrifice to challenges faced by the institutional far right from the time of the Movimento Sociale Italiano in the 1970s, Alleanza Nazionale in the mid-1990s, and Fratelli d’Italia today. With the far right on the rise in Italy and abroad, the book identifies the characteristics of remembering that define far-right memory culture and investigates the role of memory in building support for the far right over time.

The book was awarded the First Book Prize (ex acqueo) by the American Association for Italian Studies. It was published in Italian by Donzelli as Politica e memoria. Il rogo di Primavalle tra storia e memoria. I discussed the book on Rai Radio 3's book programme Fahreneheit (from 40 mins).  

I am currently writing my second monograph, which will consider the memory of Giacomo Matteotti nationally and internationally over the past century. It will be published by Cambridge University Press. This builds on a journal article I published in Italian Studies, which examines the role of Matteotti's memory in the construction of the new Republic (1943-47). I recently co-authored a piece on the centenary of his assassination for Time magazine titled 'The Centennial of an Assassination in Italy Offers a Sober Warning for Today.'

I am also very interested in transnational memory cultures. My article 'The Battle for Influence: Memory of Transnational Martyrs in the U.S. Italian Diaspora Under Fascism' analyses commemoration of the Italian antifascist Giacomo Matteotti and the Blackshirts Giuseppe Carisi and Michele Ambrosoli, who were killed in New York, and proposes the concept of the transnational martyr. I argue that the transnational exchange evident in commemoration of both case studies added to the propagandistic power of the martyrological narrative of personal sacrifice by drawing meaning from geographical distance from Italy.

Teaching

I teach on a range of units, including Memory (Year 3) and my Special Field unit (Year 2) on the history and memory of the Italian far right over the past hundred years.

I am interested in creative anti-fascist pedagogy practices, and was recently awarded a Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship by the Royal Historical Society to run an antifascist zine-making workshop with Ioana Simion from Artizine UK. I reflected on the place of zines in a blog post for the RHS titled Towards a Creative Antifascist Pedagogy: Zine-Making in the Classroom. I was invited to present this work to UNESCO in April 2025 as part of a roundtable titled 'Reinforcing Education for Dignity, Equality and Mutual Respect in a New Era.'

In 2024, Dr Brian J. Griffith (Fresno State University, California) and I launched an online archive of neofascist posters harvested from the streets of Rome. Where Monsters Are Born provides in-depth academic analysis of each poster, deconstructing far-right propaganda strategies to help students develop their visual literacy. Lesson plans, a full bibliography and other multimedia sources are also provided. We have presented this work at the American Historical Association conference, and at the Casa Italiana - Columbia University, New York.

PhD Supervision

I am currently co-supervising a PhD on popular consensus in Italy during the Fascist dictatorship, and another on Fascist continuities in Brazil under Bolsonaro.

I welcome applications from candidates working on the far-right globally, political violence (and the ways it is remembered), and memory studies more broadly.