​I am affiliated with the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, the Museum Studies program at the Faculty of Information,  the Tri-Campus History Department, and the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. I previously taught at West Virginia University and George Mason University. I am a Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and current President (2024-26) of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.

I earned an M.A. in Social Sciences and a Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago, and my  B.A. at Wesleyan University in Classics and the College of Letters. I also studied at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.

My intellectual pursuits are constantly evolving. As an undergraduate, I focused on classical philology, archaeology, philosophy, and history. This ultimately led to graduate work in the classical tradition and the politics of museums and archaeology, particularly in the context of twentieth-century Europe. This trajectory culminated in my first book, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy, which explores the Fascist idea of Rome (romanità) and the role played by museologists, archaeologists, scholars, and urban planners in its development and promotion.

From studying Fascist political culture, I turned to work on its enduring material and discursive traces in contemporary Italy. To this day, it is not uncommon to encounter monuments, buildings and iconography erected by Mussolini’s regime across Italy, and the Fascist period has increasingly been cast in nostalgic, heritagizing and valourizing terms by forces hostile to pluralism and liberal democracy. My current book project, Forty-Five Days: Italians after Mussolini, situates these issues historically by returning to the immediate aftermath of Mussolini’s regime in 1943, and to reckonings with Fascism that unfolded in the streets. I also explore related questions in a transnational and comparative context, alongside my collaborator Lilia Topouzova, in our SSHRC Connection Grant-funded project ​Authoritarianism: Lives, Legacies, Traumas.

As these various projects suggest, I am especially interested in the politics of commemoration and the institutions and processes through which they are expressed, from museums, archaeology and monuments to everyday acts of preservation and iconoclasm. Our mnemonic reconstructions are themselves historically contingent, telling us more about ourselves as they do about the past. This emphasis opens space for public engagement; see for example a discussion of my work in the New Yorker; my talk on controversial monuments for the World Monuments Fund and my remarks on the January 6th assault on the Capitol. As historians and scholars of memory, we have a responsibility to challenge facile or preconceived narratives, and through nuanced and responsible analysis to show that “it was NOT ever thus.” This role is essential for promoting pluralism, equity, social justice, and liberal democracy.