A transnational historian of modern Europe, I am an associate professor in the department of history and the program in international studies at the Université de Montréal. I trained in the United States and France and earned my PhD from Indiana University. As a researcher, I use the archives and the classroom to question fundamental dichotomies—center/periphery, universal/national, developed/backward, local/global—and reveal how relations between these categories are not as straightforward as they appear. Focused primarily on Southeast Europe and France in a global context, my research and teaching broadly engage with the historical literature as well as the work of postcolonial theorists, scholars of science and technology studies, and specialists in international relations.
My first monograph, Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2025. Based on archival work in Greece, Romania, and France, Unintended Nations explores a specific concept of civilization and the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices it invoked—or what I refer to as civilization-speak—in the early- and mid-nineteenth century. This was not the universalist civilization that appeared in the works of enlightenment-era writers like Nicolas de Condorcet, nor was it the mission civilisatrice that French figures deployed later in the nineteenth century to justify their colonial adventures. Instead, civilization-speak was an intermediate step between the two. Civilization-speak furnished French liberals in the post-Napoleonic era with a discursive frame for the exercise of soft power during a period of military and diplomatic weakness.
Unintended Nations focuses on notables in France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania (important centers of Hellenophone cultural, political, and economic life at the time). In it, I show how and why, after Napoleon’s defeat, Paris-based liberals formed partnerships with Orthodox elites in Southeast Europe. They used civilization-speak to describe and promote these relationships, which aimed to produce informal economic and cultural colonies in the Balkans. I explore the implications of these interactions in regional and domestic politics on both sides of the continent. In the French context, I reveal the central place of these exchanges and civilization-speak in the development of liberalism and of a liberal reform agenda. I likewise demonstrate how these contacts provided a framework for the articulation of nascent national identities in the Greek and the Romanian lands—culminating in the development of the unintended nations of Greece and Romania. Situating this history in a global context, I link these entanglements to Franco-British economic competition in the Americas and discuss how they helped crystalize the cultural, political, and biopolitical borders of Europe and the West.
Unintended Nations rethinks the center-periphery model in international history, examines connections between liberalism and informal empire, and questions the inevitable rise of nationalism in peripheral, or so-called “backward,” regions such as Southeast Europe.
Currently, I am working on a new book-length study, Empirical Plunder. It investigates three scientific expeditions orchestrated by the French state in Greece (1828-33), Algeria (1839-42), and Mexico (1864-67) to unsettle the formal/informal empire binary. These expeditions were sites where French scientists, military officers, politicians, and financiers, as well as local elites, transformed ideas about civilization and development into a continuum of colonial practices. While French actors applied many of the same techniques in each place, these peripheries were not interchangeable, and their actions rendered some spaces sites of formal colonization and others objects of French soft power. The distinction between informal/formal empire was itself productive: differentiating between these peripheries forged economic and biopolitical hierarchies. Empirical Plunder uses the scientific expeditions to investigate how this process of differentiation worked.
The scientific expeditions functioned as sites of competition among French experts with divergent professional and political views on the desirability and limits of soft power and hard conquest. They were points of contact between French and local experts, creating spaces of exchange and confrontation, notably over scientific authority. They generated knowledge, techniques, and practices that facilitated cultural, political, and economic forms of imperial plunder—simultaneously co-opting the histories of these lands to legitimate French (informal) colonization and imposing a program for future economic modernization that would benefit France. The expeditions likewise offer a window onto the use of science to validate politics and how politics dictated what constituted science.
Additionally, I am part of a collaborative research team based at the New Europe College/Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest, Transnational Histories of Corruption. Our project explores how West European notions of political and economic corruption entered the Central-South-East European space. Employing the tools of semantic history, we demonstrate how the introduction of novel understandings of corruption became a crucial element in the transition from early modern to modern forms of political and economic interaction in the region and served as a vehicle of informal imperialism. Our first collective volume, Conceptualizing Corruption in the Age of Revolutions: Between Old Regimes and New Orders in Central-South-East Europe, which I co-edited with Silvia Marton, the group’s PI, will be out with Bloomsbury Press this year.
I became interested in the relationship between West and East Europe as an undergraduate exchange student in France. My first extended stay in Paris coincided with the EU’s initial expansion into East Europe. This moment of Euro-optimism stimulated me to think deeply about what it meant to be a European at the beginning of the twenty-first century and in the past. It also incidentally incited a reevaluation of my own family’s history and cultural sensibilities—having fled Ceaușescu’s regime, my father and grandparents pushed me to learn an “important” language like French, rather than teaching me Romanian at home. Without realizing it at the time, I started down a path that would culminate in a dissertation on the sort of French “influence” that had brought me to Paris in the first place.
As an instructor, in both my history and international studies courses, I invite students to bring their own experiences—personal, political, and intellectual—into the classroom. I help them think critically about the assumptions they make and how so many notions accepted as “natural” (East and West Europe, for example), are really “naturalized” concepts. I push them to explore the intellectual, political, and personal consequences of taking such broad categories at face value and encourage them to investigate alternative ways of understanding history and the world.