Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and Political Opportunities:

 In the summer of 2020, while mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States experienced an unprecedentedly massive wave of protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement. Given the novelty of this upswell and the lack of a clear precedent thereof, there does not yet exist much scholarly analysis into why and how this movement expanded as significantly as it did or what developmental routes it may take as in the future. My research seeks to remedy this gap by employing the political process theory of social movement activity to interpret how the COVID pandemic increased opportunities for insurgent activity, how Black Lives Matter was in a prime position to take advantage of those opportunities, and how the movement can and should approach its future development to retain the support and leverage it accumulated during the 2020 protests. Through informal qualitative analysis rooted in the political process model, I suggest that COVID led to greater public recognition of institutional maladies in the United States, which Black Lives Matter was able to channel toward protest activity thanks to the low-cost, high-reward membership system inherent in its non-hierarchical structure and tactful use of social media. I then briefly consider different developmental paths that Black Lives Matter may take and assert that carefully implemented attempts at formalization will allow the movement to retain its organizing potential regardless of any volatile external opportunities.</jats:p

Fascism on screen: Fascist Italy’s film diplomacy campaigns in the United States

In the ten years before the outbreak of World War Two interrupted United States-Italy diplomatic relations, the Italian Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini sought to influence Americans’ opinion of Fascism by distributing Italian films in America. However, these campaigns have never been considered in their totality in scholarship on Fascist propaganda. This project seeks to provide a more complete examination of the Fascist regime’s efforts to use film as a propaganda tool in America by reviewing the exhibition and circulation work of Italian diplomats, Italian American organizations operating on behalf of the regime, and commercial distributors who signed agreements with the regime in the 1930s and early 1940s. By examining past scholarship in Fascist cinema studies, intragovernmental communications on different film distribution initiatives, and deliberations between regime officials and their implementing partners in America, I conclude that despite the best efforts of many agents of the regime to offer a positive vision of Fascism and Fascist Italy to Italian and non-Italian Americans through the cinema, Fascist film diplomacy initiatives in America were consistently limited in their ineffectiveness thanks to inadequate organizational, administrative, and economic support from the Italian government