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
In Progress: Empirical Plunder: Ruins of the Past, Economies of the Future, and France’s Scientific Expeditions (Greece, Algeria, Mexico)
Exploratory funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada/Université de Montréal
Editions: Hardcover and e-book, August, 2025; paperback, forthcoming, January, 2027
Reviews: American Historical Review, 2026; Slavic Review, 2026; Historical Review/La Revue Historique, 2026
Features: “Roundtable: Civilization-Speak and New Research on Southeast Europe,” Department of History, Indiana University, 2026; Director’s Bookshelf, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, 2025; New Books Network with Miranda Melcher Podcast, 2025; “New Knowledge Lightning Round,” Read Québec Book Fair, 2025; Book Panel, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2025; Book Panel, Society for Romanian Studies, 2025
Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Université de Montréal; US Fulbright Program; American Council of Learned Societies
Edited Volumes (co-editor)
Conceptualizing Corruption in the Age of Revolutions: Between Old Regimes and New Orders in Central-South-East Europe, co-edited with Silvia Marton. Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2026.
Funding: European Research Council, “Transnational Histories of ‘Corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)” (TransCorr ERC-2022-AdG no. 101098095)
Journal Articles and Chapters in Edited Volumes (refereed)
“The Science of Civilization: French (informal) Empire, Race Science, and the Development of Global Hierarchies,” projected submission to Modern Intellectual History, summer 2027.
“Greek Brothers and Phanariot Foes: Ion Eliade-Rădulescu and the Legacies of Grecophone Culture in the Danubian Lands.” In Phanariot Corruption, edited by Silvia Marton and Andrei-Dan Sorescu, in progress.
“A Corrupt Governor? Kapodistrias’s Assassination in the Francophone Press.” In New Dimensions of 1821, edited by Katerina Lagos, Bloomsbury Press, accepted.
“Introduction” co-authored with Silvia Marton. In Conceptualizing Corruption in the Age of Revolutions: Between Old Regimes and New Orders in Central-South-East Europe, edited by Silvia Marton and Alex R. Tipei. Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming, 2026.
“Critique and Construct: Good Governance, Corruption, and Modernity across the Transition to Greek Independence.” In Conceptualizing Corruption in the Age of Revolutions: Between Old Regimes and New Orders in Central-South-East Europe, edited by Silvia Marton and Alex R. Tipei. Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming, 2026.
“Accusations of Tyranny: Mobilizing the Ottoman Imperial Past in Service of West European Informal Empire in the Early Greek State.” In Infrastructure Development, Corruption, Xenophobia, and Colonial Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century South-Eastern Europe, edited by Silvia Marton and Andrei-Dan Sorescu, Central European University Press, 2026.
“What Did Romanianness Mean to Ion? Moving Beyond Methodological Nationalism through Keith Hitchins’s Pedagogy.” Journal of Romanian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (2024): 217-37.
“‘And Mama Studied with Me’: Elementary Education, Modernization, Gendered Curricula, and the Reconfiguration of the Public and Private in the Danubian Principalities and Greek Lands, 1810s-1840s.” East European Politics and Societies, vol. 31, no. 1 (2023): 239-63.
“Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization of an Idea.” In From the Napoleonic Age to the Age of Empires: Empire after the Emperor, edited by Thomas Dodman and Aurélien Lignereux, Palgrave, 2023.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People: Elementary Education, French ‘Influence,’ and the Balkans, 1815-40s.” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 15, no. 3 (Nov., 2018): 621-49.
Romanian Translation: “Cum să-ți faci prieteni și să ‘influența’ franceză și Balcanii, anii 1815-1840.” Revista Istorică, vol. 3, no. 4-6 (2021): 373-98.
“Audience Matters: ‘Civilization-Speak,’ Educational Discourses, and Balkan Nationalism, 1815-40.” European History Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4 (Fall, 2018): 658-85.