Federico Marcon is a historian of ideas. Trained in the intellectual history of early modern and modern Japan, Marcon is broadly interested in the interaction of social, intellectual, institutional, and politico-economic dynamics in knowledge production in the early-modern and modern periods, with a particular concern for semiotics and historiography. A native of Italy, he earned a laurea degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures (with a parallel concentration in philosophy of language and semiotics) from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, and after extended periods of research in Japan at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Waseda University, he earned a Ph.D. from the History-East Asia program of Columbia University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies of Harvard University, he worked as tenure-track assistant professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. He joined Princeton University in 2011.

His first book, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), is a social and intellectual history of the creation, developments, institutionalization and eventual disappearance of a field of nature studies in Tokugawa Japan. Its primary goal is to introduce the practices, textual production, terminology, and conceptions of honzō (materia medica) studies and the changing Japanese views on the material environment, but it also aims to reconstruct the social forces that dominated the life of scholars and cultural producers in the early modern period. The work is characterized by an interdisciplinary style, mixing together elements of social, intellectual, and environmental historiography as well as of the history of science.

His second monograph, Fascism: The History of a Word (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), is a history of the word “fascism” and of its changing political and heuristic agency. It reconstructs and maps the multiplication of its meanings, usages, and referents from its invention in 1919 to the present, by way of its movements around the world, across languages, social groups, and political interests, and through intricate intertextual and intersemiotic networks. It does not just map the complex semantic palimpsest of the term. It rather reconstructs the production of some of its key denotative and connotative markers by different historical actors (Mussolini, Fascist authors, antifascist activists, postwar historians, social and political scientists, artists, philosophers, etc.) and the interpretive habits that these meaning-making acts elicited. The book conceives of a political dilemma in philosophical terms and pursues its analysis through historical investigations. The question it explicitly asks, in its simplest form, is whether “fascism” can function as a generic concept that legitimately collects under the same rubric regimes that have socio-historically distinct genesis, on the assumption that they share some essential common characteristics.

Current Projects and Research Interests

Professor Marcon is currently working on two book projects. The first, provisionally entitled Money Talks: A Semiotic History of Monetary Structures in Early Modern Japan, reconstructs how money affected Tokugawa society and the ideas that sustained it. As means of exchange, representation of value, measurable expression of social relations, and vehicle of social power through debit/credit relations, money was one of the leading engines of change in Tokugawa society. Thanks to a fellowship from the Japan Foundation spent at the University of Tokyo, he has conducted archival research on Tokugawa trimetallic system; on mathematical and financial techniques utilized by merchants to calculate profit, interests, investment rates, etc.; on how money affected language, ideas, and knowledge in the period. The second, Monsters We Live By: Semiotic Perspectives on the Logic of Cultures, is a historical and comparative analysis of the figure of the monster conceived of as a semiotic device, a meaning-making machine operating within a variety of texts (folktales, religious myths and images, rituals, novels, films, graphic novels, video games, etc.). It studies how different cultures have imagined and classified monsters and analyzes how these representations changed over time to perform different social functions. As negative objectifications of the most fundamental but often invisible social structures, conceptions, and anxieties, monsters offer a unique key to understand the culture that engendered them. Rather than understanding monsters as cultural universals or psychoanalytical archetypes, the book introduces monsters in their specific sociohistorical context. The semiotic function of monsters can be understood only within the specific context that produced them. As “meaning-making machines” representing and disseminating society’s innermost desires, fears, fantasies, and nationalist projects, monsters are at the same time useful keys to understanding the logic of cultures. Monsters appear in the historical development of different cultures as symbols regulating what is assumed to be normal and abnormal. They express, in negative, the identity of a cultural community, actual or imagined; and the abjection and fear that they generate have the function of policing and protecting that identity. Monsters are the negation of what a society conceives as natural and proper. The semiotics of monsters, thus, reveals the ways in which society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, and the repressed, in different modes and in different historical contexts, contributing to unveil how societies manufacture and justify discrimination, marginalization, and extermination.

Between the two long projects, Marcon has published and is working on articles and public lectures on Italian Fascism, on the history of knowledge and the history of philosophy in early modern Japan, on the theories and methodologies of history-writing, and on interpretive semiotics.

Besides his work on Japan, Professor Marcon is interested in various issues in fields as varied as semiotics, the history and philosophy of the discipline of history, comparative history of philosophy, and the history of science.