Weds 4/15 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Joseph Fronczak, research scholar at Princeton University’s Department of History, is joined in conversation with Shiri Pasternak about his new book from Cambridge University Press, The Five Ages of Antifascism, a global history of antifascism from its inception to our own times.

The book’s inspiration and subject of critique is a work of fascist history, Robert O. Paxton's classic essay “The Five Stages of Fascism.” Paxton influentially studied fascism by comparing national case studies and proposing a cycle of five developmental stages through which each national fascism might progress. Fronczak counters Paxton's method of stages with one of ages: instead of organizing antifascism into national case studies going through stages, he organizes antifascism's global history into five ages, stressing the transnational causes and solidarities that pushed global antifascism to take form and shift shape over time. Part of Cambridge’s “Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism” series, a further aim of this book is to pose this history of antifascism as a counterhistory of fascism, a sort of epistemological experiment for rethinking fascism's history through a formulation of antifascism's history.

Joseph Fronczak is a historian who has primarily written on politics and ideology in the modern world. He has also written on aspects of capitalism, labor, empire, the national security state, and social movements. He is the author of two books: Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism and The Five Ages of Antifascism. Fronczak received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in history at Yale University. He has been a faculty fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.

Shiri Pasternak is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is currently serving at Princeton as Laurence G. Pathy ’56 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies and is teaching a course titled “The Long Arc of Fascism” for the Humanities Council’s Program in Humanistic Studies. Pasternak is the co-founder and former research director for the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank based in the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017. She has contributed to numerous essay collections and academic journals, while also writing for The Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and Canada’s National Observer.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University's Department of History, Princeton's Humanities Council, The Fund for Canadian Studies, and Labyrinth Books.