Education
Ph.D. History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Anticipated May 2025)
M.A. History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020)
B.A. History, University of Florida (2016)
Research Interests
I am primarily a scholar of the Russian Empire, whose history I research and teach from global perspectives. I am particularly interested in exploring themes of religion, mobility, nationalism, and empire, which illuminate how historical actors from a variety of backgrounds participated in shaping their present and our past.
My current project, “Russia and the Global Holy Land, 1800-1914,” investigates how Russians engaged in various nineteenth-century processes globalizing and reshaping Ottoman-controlled Palestine. My dissertation, the first part of this project, examines key evolutions and outcomes of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox Christian pilgrimage. Above all, I contend that Russians collectively used pilgrimage as a means of modernization, embracing mass media to mobilize believers, steamships to transport them across seas, and philanthropic organizations to subsidize and manage pilgrims’ journeys. I also analyze how pilgrims reshuffled and reconfigured their identities during their travels, alternately linking themselves through shared rites and beliefs with Greek and Arab Orthodox, positioning themselves as coequals with European competitors, or setting themselves apart from all through their distinctive “Russianness.” I am also composing several articles adjacent to that study, including an investigation of how Russians participated in Palestine’s global souvenir market and acquired for themselves portions of the Holy Land’s abundant spiritual riches. My first academic monograph will continue exploring these histories by more comprehensively detailing how Russians participated in the broader, global phenomena reshaping nineteenth-century Palestine.
Russian is my primary research language, though I use French- and Turkish-language sources, too. Additionally, I am building my fluency in digital humanities, especially platforms used for mapping and analyzing historical data. I maintain professional affiliations with the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity (ASEC).
My research and experiences as a language instructor have informed my approaches to teaching university-level history courses. I often anchor my discussions of global phenomena in Russia or the Holy Land, my main areas of expertise. Besides emphasizing my main research themes as key throughlines in my courses, I also consider how gender, class, and culture illuminating lenses for viewing the past. My classes are built around opportunities for students to produce their own critical analysis of the past, especially in breakout groups and collective responses to primary source materials. I have served as a Teaching Assistant for courses in United States, Russian, global, military, and environmental history. I have also served as instructor of record for “Russia under the Last Tsars and Commissars” (1850-present) and “Global Christianity since 1450.”