Between 1569 and 1582, the inquisitorial court of the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples undertook a series of trials against a powerful and wealthy group of Spanish immigrants in Naples for judaizing, the practice of Jewish rituals. The immense scale of this campaign and the many complications that resulted render it...
In March 1977 an exceptionally strong earthquake struck Romania ruled by the communist president and dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his regime. The policies and actions implemented and undertaken in the days, weeks, and year that followed were forms of aftershocks. The Ceauşescu regime modeled the 1977 earthquake recovery on previous...
This dissertation argues that silence played a fundamental role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian novel writing, operating as a productive force in service of sympathetic exchange and creative labor. It examines Charles Lamb's and Thomas Carlyle’s foundational roles in detaching silence from its traditional Romantic associations with solitude,...
This dissertation seeks to explain the discursive origin, development, and transformation of “Republican anticommunism,” and how and why this state-originated ideology continues to shape Vietnamese exile communities today. The dissertation focuses on examining mechanisms that allows certain narratives produced by the Republic of Vietnam to persist, despite the regime changes,...
“Musical Networks in Bergamo and the Borders of the Venetian Republic, 1580–1630,” examines the mediation and circulation of northern Italian music through social and professional networks with an emphasis on Bergamo, a thriving musical center during this period. In so doing, I challenge established narratives of early modern history that...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
Convent education was financially accessible to many girls whose families could not afford a private tutor and nuns were the largest group of educated, culturally-active women in pre-modern Europe. Convent education mirrored the general contours of humanist education by associating learning with morality, serving the purposes of the Venetian republic,...
The unprecedented crimes of World War Two, especially those committed by the Nazi state, unleashed an equally unprecedented effort to hold perpetrators accountable and secure justice for millions of victims. This effort encompassed hundreds of trials of thousands of individuals in the immediate postwar period and continues to the present...
This dissertation asks how a dynamic of vengeance involving the United States and anti-imperialist political organizations in the Middle East emerged and persisted between the 1967 Middle East war and the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. It tracks the construction of channels—ideological, institutional, emotional, and personal—through...
The renewed scholarly interest in the connections between taxation, state building efforts, and long-term economic development has revitalized the study of historical tax systems. How did today’s states initially acquire ‘fiscal capacity’, and why was this process more successful in some places than in others? Since African tax systems are...