On April 30 and May 1, the European Union Center hosted the two-day workshop The Body in Extremis: Fascism, Health, and the Autoimmune State at the Levis Faculty Center. The event brought together scholars working across fascism studies, biopolitics, race, medicine, environmental politics, and authoritarian governance to examine how discourses of health, safety, and bodily "normality" have historically been mobilized to justify exclusion, coercion, and violence. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study, the Center for Global Studies, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies.
The workshop opened with welcome remarks by Emanuel Rota, Director of the European Union Center, who introduced the organizing framework of autoimmunity — the condition in which a body's own defense mechanisms turn against itself — as a lens for understanding how contemporary far-right and authoritarian movements frame their projects not as extremism, but as protection.
The first panel, Autoimmunity, Care, and Exclusion, chaired by Sibel Arikoglu, featured Catherine Clune-Taylor (Duke University) and Shelley Tremain. Clune-Taylor examined the January 6th insurrection through the lens of autoimmunity, exploring how whiteness as a form of political immunity has become increasingly unstable. Tremain brought together Foucauldian biopolitics and feminist philosophy of disability to analyze how bioethics functions as a eugenic mechanism.
The second panel, Race, Persecution, and Social Policy, chaired by Kevin Crandall, featured Valeria Galimi (University of Florence) and Paul Weindling (Oxford Brookes University). Galimi traced continuities between early twentieth-century racial politics and the contemporary Italian New Right's recourse to community and protection discourse. Weindling examined the victims of coerced medical experimentation in the Nazi state, situating their experiences within the broader logic of an autoimmune political order.
The third panel, Sovereignty, Empire, and the Ordering of Populations, chaired by Nathan Howard, featured Roberta Pergher (Indiana University) and Tamir Bar-On (Tecnológico de Monterrey). Pergher examined the tensions between sovereignty, borders, and population ordering in Fascist Italy's imperial project, while Bar-On analyzed the ideological dimensions of Canada's response to the Freedom Convoy as a window into contemporary far-right mobilization. The day's sessions concluded with presentations by Emanuel Rota and Noah Eber-Schmid (Indiana University Bloomington). Rota examined the biopolitical dimensions of American far-right thought, focusing on the figure of Revilo P. Oliver and the concept of immunity. Eber-Schmid explored how fears of political contagion and antidemocratic anxieties have shaped the boundaries of democratic practice in American political thought.
The second day opened with Panel 4, Nature, Purity, and the Healthy Body, chaired by Lea Karpov. Peter Staudenmaier (Marquette University) traced the historical arc from the German Life Reform movement to contemporary Make America Healthy Again politics, examining how naturalist lifestyles have intersected with authoritarian ideologies. Catherine Tebaldi presented research on far-right digital wellness culture and "Granola Nazi" subcultures, analyzing how nature-based and beauty discourse normalizes far-right ideas.
Panel 5, Brazil, Morality, and the Transnational Far Right, chaired by Deiver De Melo, featured Jerry Dávila, Benjamin A. Cowan (UC San Diego), and Alexandre Gonçalves (UIUC). Cowan examined the relationship between fascism, masculine embodiment, and the Brazilian far right, while Gonçalves analyzed the metaphysical and crusading dimensions of Brazil's New Right as a media and communication phenomenon.
The workshop concluded with a roundtable titled Protection, Health, and the Politics of Exclusion, bringing together Emanuel Rota, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Peter Fritzsche, Brett Ashley Kaplan, and Jessica Greenberg for a wide-ranging discussion drawing on political theory, German history, Holocaust and memory studies, and political anthropology. The roundtable reflected on the conference's central argument: that the grammar of care and protection has served, across historical and contemporary contexts, as one of the most durable instruments of political exclusion.
The workshop was supported by the 2025–2028 Jean Monnet Center of Excellence grant and reflects the Center's commitment to fostering critical, interdisciplinary inquiry into the historical roots and contemporary forms of authoritarianism in Europe and beyond.