Education
I earned my M.A. (1999) and Ph.D. (2007) from the Department of History at the University of Chicago. I concentrated in modern European history, under the direction of Dr. Michael Geyer.
I received a B.A. (1997) from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, double-majoring in Classics and the College of Letters. I also spent a semester abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy.
Scholarly Interests
My original academic interests lay in classical philology, archaeology and ancient history. Having studied both Latin and Greek in high school, I became a Classics major at Wesleyan; this course of study led me to travel to Rome during my sophomore year to attend the ICCS, a semester-long program focused on classical archaeology, architecture, history and languages.
However, a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum (literally). I found myself disoriented, even alienated, by the remains of the ancient city. We were expected to look at the Eternal City through a filter, mentally reconstructing the Rome of Augustus while overlooking the countless layers of history that had accumulated over the centuries. And Rome is not just a city of the past, but a city of the present - what does it mean to live a modern life in such surroundings? What led Rome's modern denizens to erect a virtual graveyard in the middle of a living city, displacing its contemporary residents in favor of those who had vanished thousands of years ago?
In the end, I decided that these questions needed to be addressed not from the perspective of the classical tradition - the enduring legacy of ancient civilizations and their reception in later centuries - but from the vantage point of modern history. Instead of seeing modern Rome in terms of the reception of antiquity, I am interested in historicizing contemporary understandings of this past. In other words, it is not just that Rome has always been the Eternal City, but that its perceived "eternality" is the result of relatively recent interventions. The Rome we experience today is largely a product of its transformation into the capital of Liberal Italy (1870-1922) and the aggressive urban renewal and excavation projects of the Fascist era (1922-1943). This is the case not only for the city's modern quarters, but for its most historic sites as well - many of which were buried or covered by later structures, well into the twentieth century.
This approach lay at the core of my doctoral dissertation (and now book manuscript), which argues that the Fascist idea of Rome (romanità) should be understood as a revolutionary discourse of modernity, rather than a reactionary embrace of distant glorious past. In this context, archaeology served not so much as an antiquarian pursuit as a scientific instrument for spatial, psychological and even moral regeneration. Viewed from this vantage point, Rome might be considered a special kind of modern city - not a city of industry or advanced capitalism, but one whose urban fabric bears the unmistakable scars and imprint of the modernist impulse to rework, remake and renew.
For more information on my work, visit the Research section or contact me directly.