Research
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My current book project, Disasters and Solidarities: Private Humanitarianism in the Era of Crisis Socialism, tells the unwritten story of Europe’s “private humanitarians” and their subterranean aid work into the socialist bloc. At the heart of this book are the journeys and encounters of men and women from different social milieus who discovered Ceausescu’s Romania as a place of moral work, danger, pleasure, and self-realization in the 1970s and 1980s. Ravaged by multiple environmental disasters and man-made crises, Romania moved in the late socialist period from the periphery of the Cold War to the center of the social imaginaries and ethical aspirations of private humanitarians in East and West, many of whom were neither political activists nor professional aid workers. Disasters and Solidarities follows and connects these transnational aid campaigns across the divided continent and opens a window into the little-known history of a shadow movement that, for over two decades, mitigated human crises alongside, but often at the margins of states and international organizations.
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This transnational history of charitable workers and volunteers in Austria, West Germany, East Germany, Hungary, and the United States that has remained untold, until now, investigates how economic, environmental, and political crises became transformative moments of humanitarian action in Eastern Europe and beyond. Disasters and Solidarities offers a new social history of humanitarianism at the intersection of socialism, authoritarian rule, and Cold War politics.
In 2020, I earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research was supported by national and international grants from the American Historical Association, the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, the Central European History Society, the Fulbright Commission, the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., the Social Science Research Council, and various research centers at the University of Michigan. |
