Research

My research focuses on the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans at the intersection of cultural, religious, and environmental history. I currently teach at the University of Pittsburgh.

I completed my doctoral dissertation at Princeton University in 2020. The dissertation “Conversion of the Landscape: Environment and Religious Politics in an Early Modern Ottoman Town” focuses on the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Spirit in the Bosnian town of Fojnica between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues that the friars constructed the meanings and modes of being an Ottoman Catholic by creatively engaging with the Catholic spiritual tradition, Ottoman legal repertoire, apprehensions over the conversion to Islam, and the material world that they shared with their Muslim neighbors.

The dissertation received Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Prize and has been Highly Commended by the Tallinn Dissertation Prize in European Environmental History.

My current project is a continuation of my interests in the history of Ottoman Catholics. Like other Ottoman communities, the Catholics were not a natural or immutable social block. Community-making was a constant and creative project of shaping bodies, places, and everyday practices along competing imperial discourses and scriptural traditions.

As a historian, I work with archives but I also examine materialities, discourses, and practices that shape them. I have written about the cultural and economic dynamics of the Ottoman archives in Catholic spaces in “From a Legal Proof to a Historical Fact: Trajectories of an Ottoman Document in a Franciscan Monastery, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century.” The article received Honorable Mention for the Ö. L. Barkan Article Prize.

You can reach me via email. I also tweet about my research, trees, and all things Balkans.