Biography

My research focuses on the politics of historical preservation and architecture in post-1945 Central and Eastern Europe, specifically on the ways political ideologies shape architecture and how architectural representations influence politics. My additional interests include the recent history of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and their relation to the politics of citizenship in contemporary Germany, and migration patterns and policies in an enlarged European Union.
I completed my dissertation, ‘Building Politics, Searching for Heritage: Architecture, Archaeology, and Imageries of Social Order in Romania (1947-2007)’, in the doctoral programme in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, under the guidance of Katherine Verdery (CUNY) and Gillian Feeley-Harnik. As a Max Weber post-doctoral Fellow, I intend to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript that will discuss the shift from an approach to heritage-as-object to heritage-as-cultural-recognition in contemporary Europe, as a prerequisite for ethnic minorities to articulate political claims in the EU.
At the University of Michigan, I worked as a teaching assistant in the Departments of Anthropology and History. In spring 2009, I also taught my own advanced undergraduate course on interdisciplinary approaches to history and memory.