Research
My current research project, titled Giving in the Time of Socialism. Humanitarianism, Economic Life, and Mobility in the Global Postwar, uncovers the shadow existence of the Cold War's "private humanitarians": advocates of national minorities, members of emigre communities, church representatives, feminist networks, private donors, and ordinary people who forged clandestine supply conduits to one of Europe’s most authoritarian regimes, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. 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 and environmental crises became transformative moments of humanitarian action in Eastern Europe and beyond.
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My research exemplifies what I seek to convey in the classroom: that the mobility of people, ideas, and materials across cultural and geographic space is often indicative of broader world historical processes, some of which resonate in the present. In this spirit, my research contributes new insights to some of the most vexing debates in current global and area studies. It scrutinizes the impact of globalization on the socialist societies of Eastern Europe prior to the economic restructuring of the region through “shock therapy” in the 1990s. It explores how private humanitarians operated under socialism outside of, and indeed as a makeshift to, the dwindling socialist welfare state since the late 1970s. And it investigates the broader effects of neoliberalism on socialism by exploring the relationship between austerity economics, social unrest, and regime collapse in Romania in 1989.
I received support for my research through national 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. |