RESEARCH
Taking networks of individuals, ideas, and material goods as its fundamental object of inquiry, my research transcends the national paradigm in historical writing as it tracks people, concepts, and objects across borders. It investigates how governments, organizations, and individuals constructed and mobilized these networks to execute specific agendas and shows how the uses and meanings of technologies, discourses, and practices changed through time and space. Firmly grounded in empirical research, this approach nonetheless allows for the reconsideration of fundamental conceptual categories—center/periphery, local/global, universal/national, developed/backward, powerful/powerless. It reveals that relations between these categories are not as straightforward as they appear, demonstrating, for instance, that a center depends on the existence of a periphery. It likewise shows how the unintended consequence of cultural, technological, and political projects often prove to be more important than their stated aims, probing, for example, how in some cases the tools of nationalism grew out of universalists endeavors. Focused on modern European history (particularly Romania, Greece, and France) in a global context, my work broadly engages with the historical literature as well as the work of postcolonial theorists, scholars of science and technology studies, and specialists in international relations. It models an approach to transnational history that goes beyond simple comparison.
PUBLICATIONS
Monographs
Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, & the Post-Napoleonic World, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.
Monographs in progress
Empirical Plunder: France’s Scientific Expeditions, (In)Formal Empire, & the Making of Peripheries, in progress.
Discourses and Practices of Slavery & Race at the Edges of Europe & its Empires, in progress.
Edited Volumes (co-editor)
Conceptualizing Corruption: Between Old Regimes & New Orders in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s), co- edited with Silvia Marton. Anticipated submission to Bloomsbury Press, December 2025.
Phanariot Afterlives, co-edited with Silvia Marton, Andrei Sorescu, in progress, anticipated submission, fall 2026.
Journal Articles
“What Did Romanianness Mean to Ion? Moving Beyond Methodological Nationalism through Keith Hitchin’s Pedagogy,” Journal of Romanian Studies, 6:2(2024): 217-237.
“‘And Mama Studied with Me’: Elementary Education, Modernization, Gendered Curricula, & the Reconfiguration of the Public & Private in the Danubian Principalities & Greek lands, 1810s-1840s,” East European Politics & Societies, 31:1 (2023): 239-263.
“How to Make Friends & Influence People: Elementary Education, French ‘Influence,’ & the Balkans, 1815-40s” Modern Intellectual History, 15:3 (Nov., 2018): 621-649.
Romanian Translation: “Cum să-ți faci prieteni și să ‘influența’ franceză și Balcanii, anii 1815-1830” Revista Istorică, 32:4-6 (2021): 373-398.
“Audience Matters: ‘Civilization-Speak,’ Educational Discourses, & Balkan Nationalism, 1815-40,” European History Quarterly, 48:4 (Fall, 2018): 658-685.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
“Greek Brothers & Phanariot Foes: Ion Eliade-Rădulescu, Anti-Phanariotism, & the Legacies of Grecophone Culture in the Danubian Lands,” in Phanariot Afterlives. Silvia Marton, Andrei-Dan Sorescu, & Alex R. Tipei (eds.), in progress.
“Introduction” (co-authored with Silvia Marton) in Conceptualizing Corruption: Between Old Regimes & New Orders in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s). Silvia Marton & Alex R. Tipei (eds.). Anticipated submission to Bloomsbury Press, December 2025.
“Critique & Construct: Good Governance, Corruption, & Modernity across the Transition to Greek Independence,” in Conceptualizing Corruption: Between Old Regimes & New Orders in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s). Silvia Marton & Alex R. Tipei (eds.). Anticipated submission to Bloomsbury Press, December 2025.
“Accusations of Tyranny & the Foreign Financing of Infrastructure in the Early Greek State: Mobilizing the Imperial Past in Pursuit of French Informal Empire,” in What Binds Must Also Separate: Infrastructural Development, Corruption, Xenophobia, & Colonial Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century South-Eastern Europe, Silvia Marton & Andrei-Dan Sorescu (eds.), Central European University Press, forthcoming.
“A Corrupt Governor? Kapodistrias’s Assassination in the Francophone Press,” in New Dimensions of 1821, Christine Philliou & Katerina Lagos (eds.), Bloomsbury Press, accepted.
“Korais’s Greece & Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, & the Europeanization of an Idea,” in From the Napoleonic Age to the Age of Empires: Empire after the Emperor, Thomas Dodman & Aurélien Lignereux (eds.), (Palgrave, 2023).
Conference Proceedings
“Care & the Politics of Sentiment,” The Workshop (Proceedings of the Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies) 4 (June, 2016): 70-72.
“Civilization & the Xenos,” The Workshop (Proceedings of the Indiana Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies) 3 (June, 2015): 41-42.
Opinion Pieces
“Why All Humanists Should Go to Prison,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2016, print & online.
GROUP RESEARCH PROJECTS
Transnational Histories of "Corruption" in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850) (TransCorr)
I currently serve as a team leader on TransCorr. Funded by the European Union (ERC, TransCorr, ERC-2022-ADG no. 101098095) and hosted by the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest.
Abstract of the Project
Politicians, scholars, and popular writers between 1750 and 1850 routinely characterized South-East-Central Europe as a corrupt political space. A wide range of foreign observers portrayed graft, nepotism, and bribery as endemic. Indigenous critics echoed many of these assessments. Regional insiders and outsiders alike mobilized commentaries on “corruption” for their own political, professional, and personal ends, claiming they could run more honest and efficient administrations, military regimes, and commercial operations than those in power. These notables linked “corruption” to the region’s supposed cultural backwardness and economic under-development. In doing so, public figures naturalized notions of “corruption,” making it appear both widespread and organic in the region—popularizing tropes that have endured right down to the present. Yet, “corruption” is a historically specific concept. TransCorr seeks to construct a history of the idea of “corruption” in Central-South-East Europe in conjunction with the rise of modernity. It demonstrates how in the context of new ideas about modernity emanating from West Europe, regional leaders reframed a host of traditional customs and practices as corrupt. It examines how Great Power attempts to transform these borderlands into formal and informal imperial provinces further entrenched novel understandings of “corruption”, often pejoratively associating them with the Ottoman legacy. By tracing out this history, TransCorr reveals a genealogy of ideas, discourses, and attitudes that continue to inform analyses of and discussions within the region today. The project brings the study of this geographic area into greater dialogue with a global story of modernization and aligns the region’s historiography with new innovations in the scientific literature. It also reframes contemporary debates on patronage and graft, and reconfigures broader understandings of center-periphery relations within the region and across the continent.