Biographical Summary

Aron Brouwer’s teaching and research focus upon the history of empire, counterrevolution, and the global radical Right. His work connects modern European, Southern African, and East Asian history. He is a Postdoctoral Tandem Fellow at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office (GHI Pacific Office) and the Institute of European Studies (IES) at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he is developing a history of counterrevolutionary internationalism in imperial, post-imperial, and settler-colonial settings from 1945 to 1991.

He received his PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2026. His dissertation, A Spirit Sweeping Across the World: Forgers, Translators, and Broadcasters of Fascism in China, France, and South Africa, 1919–1949, reconstructs how foreign fascist and radical-right texts, voices, and political models were recontextualized by intermediaries whose labor redirected the political thrust of these materials toward local enemies and ambitions, often making them ammunition for local struggles. Across the dissertation’s cases, recontextualization redistributed imperial agency by changing who seemed to impose domination, who could speak for national liberation, and which hierarchies remained hidden behind that promise.

His broader research spans interwar fascism and anti-fascism, postwar counterrevolutionary internationalism, and the ways in which radical-right actors since 1991 have drawn upon earlier institutional precedents, political languages, and memories.