Love letters to Hitler will be on the syllabus; Italian futurism, eugenics and empire building in North Africa, China and Japan will also be covered in the Fall 2019 Honors College Signature Seminar, Fascists. 

"Hitler received more fan mail than the Beatles," said Kelly Hammond, an assistant professor of history who will lead the course. "We're going to do a deep dive, read these love letters to Hitler and think critically about how people defined their relationship to the Führer. Beyond the militarism, the atrocities, we will explore why fascism was an appealing movement to people who were disappointed with global capitalism and didn't want to fall into the communist camp."

All on campus and in the community are invited to attend a free public preview lecture by Hammond. The lecture will take place at 5:15 p.m. Monday, Feb. 4 in Gearhart Hall Auditorium (GEAR 26) and will also be streamed via Facebook Live on the Honors College Facebook page.

The current moment is a particularly fertile time to look at fascism from a global perspective, Hammond said. 

"Our distance from actual events — the atrocities committed by fascist regimes in the '30s and '40s — allows us to tell different stories, take a different perspective, and ask new questions," she said. "We also have access to classified documents that were not available thirty—even twenty—years ago."

The course will track the development of fascism after World War I and study the deep connections between different fascist regimes, from Franco's Spain to Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist Party. Hammond and her students will also focus on a broad range of themes related to fascist ideology, including gender, race, youth culture, the environment, science, art and architecture, colonialism, militarism, religion and politics.

Although "fascist" is used as a pejorative term today, some are eager to link historic fascism and contemporary far-right-wing movements. The class and lecture will address the reemergence of authoritarianism, but Hammond is wary of drawing too firm of a line between the past and the present: "Neo-fascism buys into the global capitalist world order we all live in. There are definitely racist, exclusionary and militant tendencies, but we'll see."

Kelly Hammond received her doctorate in East Asian history from Georgetown University and is an assistant professor of East Asian history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. She currently holds a research fellowship in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, where she is working on a book manuscript called China's Muslims and Japan's Empire.

Hammond's primary interests focus on the history of Islam in the Pacific War and the new Cold War world order in East Asia, though her general research interests include the broader study of imperialism and nationalism in Asia, minority populations in China's borderlands, World War II in the Pacific, espionage and the history of the relationship between nomads and settled peoples in East Asia. Her work has been supported by grants and funding from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.