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 Southeastern Europe and France) in a global context, my work broadly engages with the historical literature as well as the work of political scientists, 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 (completed manuscript)
Unintended Nations: How French Liberals’ Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World.
Monographs in progress (funded projects)
Nascent Networks: French Saint-Simonians and Development in Greece and Mexico, 1820-1870 (anticipated completion 2026).
Slavery & Race at the Edges of Europe and its Empires (anticipated completion, 2027).
Journal Articles
“Discipline & Discipline: Lessons about History Learned from Teaching Foucault in the Prison,” in progress, anticipated submission fall 2023.
“What Did Romanianness mean to Ion? Keith Hitchin’s Legacy and Methodological Nationalism,” A Special Issue in Honor of Keith Hitchins, Journal of Romanian Studies, in progress, draft due April 2024.
“‘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 & Societies, forthcoming.
“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, forthcoming.
“Audience Matters: ‘Civilization-Speak,’ Educational Discourses, & Balkan Nationalism, 1815-40,” European History Quarterly, 48:4 (Fall, 2018): 658-685.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
“A Corrupt Governor? Kapodistrias’s Assassination in the Francophone Press,” in New Dimensions of 1821, ChristinePhilliou & Katerina Lagos (eds.), under review, Oxford University Press.
“Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization of anIdea,” 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,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2016, print & online.