Roberta Pergher

Office: 3617 Wescoe Hall
Phones: 864-9468
Email: rpergher@ku.edu

Assistant Professor (PhD, University of Michigan, 2007; MA, University of Denver, 2000; BA, University of Denver, 1998)

Dr. Pergher’s research explores fascist Italy’s settlement policies in national borderlands and on the imperial frontier. By comparing and contrasting the fascist approach to national consolidation in the Alpine province of South Tyrol and to imperial expansion in the African colony of Libya, she shows how visions of national homogeneity and solidarity collided with the pursuit of a neo-Roman, multi-ethnic Mediterranean empire. Along the way Dr. Pergher explores the roots of fascism’s support, the character and limits of its violence, and the ways in which fascist state-building challenged or incorporated longstanding experiences of poverty, emigration, and clientelism. Dr. Pergher has published articles on the topics of Italian colonialism and fascist settlement and is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “A Tale of Two Borders: Fascist Settlement and Nation-building from the Alps to Africa.”

For her next project, Dr. Pergher plans to write a cultural and social history of World War I in the Alps. Relying on memoirs, military sources, photographs, and on-site visits, the study will analyze the ways in which Alpine combat was embedded in a military culture of trench warfare as well as in the nationalist ideal of mountain conquest. It will also explore the enormous impact which the form and ferocity of Alpine combat had on the lives of soldiers and on the people living in the valleys below.

Dr. Pergher was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and a postdoctoral fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. She has taught graduate courses on 19th and 20th Europe and on global and colonial history as well as undergraduate courses on modern Europe, comparative fascism, European imperialism, post-1945 Europe, and sports and leisure in modern Italy. In the spring semester she will be offering a course on Hitler and Nazi Germany as well as a thesis writing seminar on Europe and its empires.