Main Areas of Interest

• Global History
• Border Studies since the 18th century
• Free Ports and Special Economic Zones (19th–21st Centuries)
• French and American Imperial Histories
• Age of Revolutions
• Migration and Refugee History

Research Project

American Boundaries and Refugee Mobilities at the Heart of the Republic and the Edge of Empire (1780s-1830s)

This book investigates the role of Atlantic exile mobilities in the formation of the early American republic and how the transboundary movement of people fleeing revolution, warfare, and slavery contributed to both the production of boundaries as well as their shifting meaning in a transimperial context during the Age of Revolutions (1770s–1830s). As the boundaries of the US shifted in the decades following independence, the status of those people on the boundary line changed too. Boundaries played a central role in determining how mobility could change one’s status and determine which groups were considered refugees. How did the massive movements of refugees during the Age of Revolutions impact the delineations of mobilities and new meanings contemporaries attributed to boundaries?

To explore this question, I situate Philadelphia as a border town in four respects: as a city at the boundary of “free soil” in North America and therefore slave flight (from beyond and within the US); as an international port city where refugees and migrants arrived; as a place from which arriving refugees planned borderland filibusters, settlement schemes, or Black emigration projects; and as the capital of the US (between 1790 and 1800) where international boundary lines were debated and negotiated. From Philadelphia, this book also looks at places along the US’s boundaries with Britain and Spain, where many exiles and mobile populations had also settled, to ask how shifting boundaries between empires impacted questions of status such as citizenship, freedom, and exile and conversely, how these questions impacted the changing placement and meaning of these boundaries.
 

For a full CV see pdf.

Publications

"The French Revolution as an Imperial Revolution" in French Historical Studies, Volume 44, Issue 3, 2021 with Manuel Covo
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"The French Revolution and the New Spatial Format for Empire: A Nation-State with Imperial Extensions" in French Historical Studies, Volume 44, Issue 3, 2021 read more

Portals of Globalization: Repositioning Mumbai’s Ports and Zones, 1833–2014, Berlin and Boston: DeGruyter, 2019. Doi

The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019, with Matthias Middell. Doi

“Bordering Practices through the Lens of Slavery and Abolition,” in Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez and Hannes Warnecke-Berger, eds., Spatialization Processes in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 177–194. https://www.peterlang.com/view/9783631772089/html/ch18.xhtml

“Zones of Reterritorialization: India’s Free Trade Zones in Comparative Perspective, 1947 to the 1980s,” Journal of Global History 12, 3, (2017): 410–432. Doi
 

For a full list of publications, see pdf.