PUBLIC LECTURE: 1970s' Terrorism: Italian Style

The Institute of Advanced Studies and the History Discipline at UWA present a series of ten public lectures attached to a new History Honours seminar. The series aims to present a context for contemporary terrorism by inviting lectures from scholars working on historical and contemporary terrorism movements. The lectures are open to all with an interest in political and social movements and their methodologies and repercussions.

Abstract: On 16 March 1978, a left-terrorist group called the Red Brigades (Brigate rosse) kidnapped Aldo Moro, the then secretary of the governing Christian Democrat (DC) party and Italian postwar politics' great fixer. Almost two months later, they murdered him, transporting his body through central Rome and leaving it about half way between the headquarters of the DC and of the opposition Communists (PCI) and right outside one of Rome's main research libraries, the Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea. In my lecture, I shall investigate the background to this killing scanning the Italian left, the Italian right and Italian politics and society at large for explanations of when political practice and when historical memory favour terrorism.

Biographical note: Richard Bosworth is Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and an active researcher over a range of modern Italian social and political history, historiography and migration studies. He is the author or editor of 18 books, of more than 50 academic articles, numerous chapters and reviews, including Mussolini (Arnold, London, OUP, New York, 2002) which has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Korean and Chinese, and which won three of Australia's literary and historical prizes and was short-listed for three others, including the national biography award. His most recent book is Mussolini's Italy: life under the dictatorship 1915-1945 (Allen Lane, London, 2005; Penguin Press, New York, 2006), of which an Italian translation will appear in 2006.

ALL WELCOME. NO RESERVATION REQUIRED.