Rate My Professor Maria Stone

Marla Stone is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Occidental College, where she has served since 1994, initially as Assistant Professor and advancing to Associate Professor in 1999 and full Professor in 2006. She chaired the department from 2000 to 2004 and 2015 to 2019. Stone earned a B.A. from Pomona College and M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. She held the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities position at the American Academy in Rome from August 2021 to January 2024 and has been a visiting professor at the University of Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A specialist in the history of fascism, dictatorship, and genocide in Europe, her research explores the interplay of culture, politics, and the state in the twentieth century, focusing on Italian Fascist politics and culture, contemporary far-right movements in Europe, Italian Holocaust memory culture, conspiracy theories, and interwar cultural diplomacy. Key publications include the monograph The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1998), which received the Howard R. Marraro Prize for the best book in Italian history from the Society for Italian Historical Studies; The Fascist Revolution (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012); and When the Wall Came Down: Responses to German Reunification (co-edited with Harold James, Routledge, 1992). She has edited volumes such as Fascist Visions (Princeton University Press, 1999), Fascism in America (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and forthcoming A Fascist in Red Spain: The Prison Memoirs of Italo Orciani (with Brian J. Griffith, University of Toronto Press, 2025). Stone is completing The Enemy: The Politics and Propaganda of Italian Anti-Communism. Her articles appear in journals including Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Constellations, European History Quarterly, and Journal of Hate Studies. She has garnered fellowships from the American Academy in Rome (Rome Prize, 1995–1996), Wolfsonian Foundation (1995, 2024), Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University (2007), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2011–2012), and European University Institute (2017). A Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei since 2023, she is past president of the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the ACLU of Southern California. Her scholarship has over 1,000 citations.