Professor Marla Stone is professor of history at Occidental College. For the 2021 to 2024 academic years, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome.

A specialist the history of fascism and in questions of dictatorship and genocide in the modern era, Professor Stone’s work emphasizes the relationship among culture, politics, and the state in the 20th century. She has published on a variety of topics in European history, including Italian Fascist cultural politics, anti-communism, the contemporary far right in Europe, Italian Holocaust memory culture, and the continuities and ruptures between historic fascism and its contemporary manifestations. In addition to the fields of modern European and Italian history, Professor Stone publishes and teaches in the field of genocide studies. Professor Stone is the author of The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1998), When the Wall Came Down: Responses to German Reunification (edited with Harold James, Routledge, 1993), and The Fascist Revolution: Society, Politics and Culture in Mussolini’s Italy (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012). The Patron State was awarded the Howard Marraro prize for best book in Italian history by the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2000.

Professor Stone has been a fellow at the European University Institute (2017) , the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2011/2012), the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2007), the American Academy in Rome (1995/1996), and the Wolfsonian Foundation (1995). Her research has also been supported by the Gladys Kreible Delmas Foundation, the Italian Academy at Columbia University and the Eli Lilly Foundation. In 2023, she was elected a member of the Accademia dei lincei.

In addition to more than 12 essay contributions to anthologies and edited collections, Professor Stone has published articles in Constellations, The Journal of Contemporary History, The Journal of Hate Studies, The Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Constellations, The European History Quarterly, and Memoria e ricerca.

Professor Stone is writing a book-length study of the role of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Communism in Italian politics and culture from Fascism through the First Republic entitled, The Enemy: The Politics and Propaganda of Anti-Communism in Italy. Her co-edited volume,  A Fascist in Red Spain: The Prison Memoirs of an Italian Volunteer in the International Brigades, 1937–1946, will be published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025. She has taught at Occidental College since 1994 and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.