Andrew Palella
Teaching Assistant
Andrew Palella
Contact
Stokes Hall South 315-D
Email: palella@bc.edu
ORCID 0009-0008-4224-0391
Education
- M.A. in History from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (2023)
- B.S. in U.S. History from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (2015)
Courses
HIST 1001: Europe in the World
HIST 145: American Military History
Research Interests
20th century political extremism in the United States, New Deal liberalism, FBI counter-intelligence early-Cold War intelligence operations and covert action, conspiracism in America
Advisor
Department
Biography
Andrew Palella is a third-year Ph.D. student whose research examines the intersection of far-right political extremism and the security state in 20th century America. His work focuses particularly on a network of right-wing extremist movements and plots that attempted to overthrow the Roosevelt administration in the mid-1930s, analyzing the mechanics of the plots, the FBI's autonomous response to these threats, and the "intellectual" tradition of far right extremism that was born from these networks. Before beginning his Ph.D. at Boston College, Andrew served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army and worked within the intelligence community. This practical experience informs his other scholarly interest in U.S. intelligence operations during the early-Cold War. Relatedly, he is working on a project that examines the CIA's first large covert action exposure—a political warfare program run in West Germany from 1950–1952 that intentionally employed and re-armed former Nazis.
From June–August 2025, Andrew was a visiting junior scholar at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, as a Summer Graduate Research Fellow. During his time as a visiting fellow, he researched and wrote about the antisemitic and pro-Nazi propaganda activities of Robert Edward Edmondson in the 1930s. Edmondson, who was one of the 28 defendants in the "Great Sedition Trial" of 1944, U.S. v. McWilliams, will feature in Andrew's eventual dissertation.
He has published two peer-reviewed articles in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism: "The Black Legion: J. Edgar Hoover and Fascism in the Depression Era," JSR 12.2 (2018) and "Toward the Galactic Imperium: The Order of Nine Angles, Cosmic Accelerationism, and the Occult Politics of Neo-Fascism," JSR 18.2 (2024).
Andrew also holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (2023) and earned his B.S. in U.S. History from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2015.
Fellowships and Awards
U.S. Holocaust Memoriam Museum Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow (June–August 2025)
Clough Center for Constructional Democracy Doctoral Fellow (2024-2026)