Three PhD positions in project “Visual Cultures of Fascism” at University of Liverpool

Application deadline: 28 February, 2025

Applications are invited for three fully-funded AHRC NWCDTP Collaborative Doctoral Award (+3) beginning in September 2025.

The rising popularity of the 35mm Leica camera and the Parvo video camera in the 1920s transformed the way that journalists, early professional photographers, amateurs and filmmakers took candid action shots and made photography and film practical political weapons for the first time. These years also witnessed the growth of fascist parties and regimes across Europe which, alongside Russian communism, proved particularly adept at using images as the cornerstones of their political communication, branding and propaganda. Co-supervised by three leading historians of European fascism, three PGR students will research how fascists used photography and film to promote themselves and their programmes. This project is grounded in historical research methods, while benefitting from insights from Art History, Photography, and Film Studies. Such an approach has only recently emerged as a research topic within Fascist Studies. The limited secondary literature on the topic focuses disproportionately on the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, and almost no comparative work has been done on fascist visual cultures transnationally. By comparing the fascist regime in Mussolini’s Italy to movements in France and Romania, the research team will be able to show how the differing availability of technology and distinct visual cultures in Western, Eastern and Southern Europe resulted in contrasting uses of photography and film across the continent.

Analysing images used by fascists from Italy, France and Romania alongside one another will allow the team to identify what photographers from all three countries had in common, as well as throwing national idiosyncrasies into more sharp relief. Working with images from Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Archive Service (SSTAS) and the Wiener Holocaust Library further expands the comparative perspective of this project, helping researchers to see how visual cultures on the continent influenced the ways that local fascism was presented to the British public. The students will apply the methodologies they have developed for interpreting fascist visual cultures to items held in the partners’ collections and will use them to create public-facing resources to be used by the partners in future educational campaigns. Collaborating with archivists and curators will allow students to engage with some of the same challenges that fascists had in the 1920s and 1930s when it came to deciding how best to use images to communicate with a wider public as well as engaging with the ethical challenges involved in using propaganda images in educational contexts. These projects digital curation, interpretation, and technical skills, and students will also gain experience working in the non-profit sector while directly generating impact related to their research in a way that informs the research process itself.

The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday, 28 February 2025. Please send application materials to Roland Clark (clarkr@liverpool.ac.uk) in the first instance, stating which of the three projects you wish to work on and including a current CV, a completed EDI form, and a 500 word summary of how you intend to approach the topic. You will be sent the EDI after submitting the CV and summary.

For more details and full descriptions of the three PhD projects see: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/studentships/visual-cultures-of-fascism/