Dr Zoë Roth, an Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham, has been successful in her application for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. The resulting project will provide a significant reassessment of the relationship between fascism and aesthetics.
Dr Roth, a member of the French Studies area of the School, will complete a project entitled The Anaesthetics of Politics: Fascism, Form, and Aesthetic Experience:
'Fascism used large-scale sporting events, mass rallies, imposing monuments, and grand spectacles to amplify political violence. Generations have subsequently been warned about the dangers of ‘aestheticizing’ politics. Yet fascism also radically restricted how people could speak, act, behave, and feel, deadening their sensory worlds. Propaganda persuaded people their perception was a fiction; mass rituals made all bodies the same; and touching ‘undesirable’ subjects could land you in jail. ‘The Anaesthetics of Politics’ offers a major reappraisal of the relation between fascism and aesthetics. Fascism, it argues, was anaesthetic—it sought to destroy aesthetic experience. Teaching, producing, and interpreting aesthetic works are thus an essential part of combatting extremist ideologies.'
It falls within the broader context of Dr Roth's work, which includes a monograph entitled Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature (2022, Edinburgh University Press).
Learn more about Dr Roth's research
Learn more about Leverhulme Research Fellowships
Image credit: 'If Not, Not' by Ronald Rooks Kitaj
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