Professor of History
Vice President International Programmes
Contact:
Email: alessid@richmond.ac.uk
School: School of Communications, Arts & Social Sciences
Research centres: International Visual Arts and Cultures and The State Power & Globalisation
About
I was born in Wales to Irish-Welsh and Italian parents, raised in Canada and studied in New Zealand after having been awarded a Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship. I have taught at McMaster University (Canada), St Thomas’s University (Canada), Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and Trinity St David’ University (Wales). I have additionally been a Visiting Professor: in the School of Arts at the University of Northampton; at Franklin University (Switzerland); and at Randolph Macon College (USA). I have also been a Research Associate for the Centre for Fascist/Anti-Fascist and Post-Fascist Studies, Teesside University (UK) and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis for the Radical Right (CARR). I have been invited to give numerous lectures throughout the world and am also a fellow of Royal Historical Society, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, and am a former Vice Chair of the New Zealand Studies Association.
I am a postcolonial, political and cultural historian of imperialism with additional interests in the history of the extreme right. I am currently working on an ambitious political history investigating definitions of empire and diverse methods of empire formation. This includes the buying and renting of imperial territory as a means of expansion and the role of non-state actors, such as filibusters, corporate players and religious organisations, in the imperial process. I am also working on a project examining the relationship between the extreme right and the occult, Heathenism and Satanism. Entitled Folk, Faith and the Far Right, this work is to be published by Manchester University Press. My interests are hiking, fencing and canoeing, and in 2018 I made a successful attempt, with my friend and colleague Mark Horne, to obtain a Guinness World Record for canoeing the length of the River Thames in a double canoe.
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