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January 2022 - December 2022
January 2021 - October 2021
I am a recent graduate of University College London with a background in political science and the history of ideas. My work has been driven by a deep interest in recovering crucial yet often forgotten conceptual recurrences that shaped cultural and political history. My doctoral dissertation, “Visions of Agency: Imagining Individual and Collective Agency in Nineteenth Century Romania” has explored how, across the long nineteenth century, historical actors reflected on the supposed (in)applicability of Western concepts to Romania, in an age of rapid modernisation and nation-building. I have thus highlighted how imagining the felicitous absence of a “proletariat” in the near future, of “feudalism” in the past, and (more problematically) of a “bourgeoisie” in the present were seen as preconditions for the development of the nation, classes, and individuals, and how this complicated the self-image of Romania as a civilizational vanguard in the European (semi-)periphery.
In 2020, I completed a project titled “The Portrait of the Tsar: Nation-Building and Transnational Entanglements in Romania” at the New Europe College, Bucharest. It has examined the impact of transnational networks’ interaction with the deployment of material/symbolic infrastructure in the service of nation-building, 1878 to 1914.
In 2022 I shall work on a second project at the ICUB, titled Jewish “Conquest”, Jewish “Colonisation”:The Continental Feedback Loops of Nineteenth Century European Anti-Semitism.
It will examine the circulation of ideas and the creation of the first transnational anti-Semitic networks, between Western and Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on three interrelated lines of inquiry. Firstly, the project argues that the language of “conquest” and “colonisation” was central to the diffusion of anti-Semitic tropes in the age of high imperialism, intelligible both to colonial powers and to peripheral, emerging nation-states who feared “colonial” intrusion. Secondly, it proposes that, based on a deliberate misreading of Jewish sources, purported examples of Jewish “conquest” in the East European periphery were invoked in Western Europe, then taken by peripheral actors as vindication of their own anxieties. Thirdly, it shows that such actors played an active part in early attempts to establish transnational anti- Semitic networks, and that this crucially shaped understandings of “centre”, “periphery” and the (inter)national in a dynamic process. Taking France and Romania as its starting-point, the project aims to uncover the broader scope of the networks that were established in the second half of the nineteenth century, and show the importance that a shared conceptual vocabulary had in their emergence.
Between January and October 2021, I am working on a project titled: “Self-Comparison and Self-Doubt: Nation-Building and Kin-Folk in Romania, 1878-1918” at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest. It considers how nation-builders in the independent Kingdom of Romania imagined ethnic Romanians outside their borders not only as victims of denationalisation, but – surprisingly – also as models for socio-cultural development, in spite of perceived imperial oppression.