Mandel Center for the Humanities

China’s rise as a regional hegemon has prompted questions about its impact on East Asian international relations. Recent works in international relations and history that emphasize the millennia-long impact of Chinese high culture often argue that the “Confucian sphere” offers unique features as a counterpoint to the Eurocentric Westphalian model, suggesting the weight of tradition, culture, and history will push China’s neighbors to accommodate Beijing’s strategic interests. Scholars often single out Korea as the ideal client state, where China traditionally exerted the greatest influence. After the Ming dynasty of China (1368-1644) saved the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea (1392-1910) from the Japanese invasions in the late 16th century, the standard narrative insists, Korea became ideologically committed to the China-centric regional order.

 This project revisits the history of international relations in early modern East Asia through the lens of Korea’s foreign policy during the 17th-century wars and regime changes in China and Japan. Despite the traditional language of deference to China and goodwill to Japan, Korea’s actions show it prioritized self-preservation over loyalty to the Sinocentric order. Analyzing underutilized primary sources, this project argues that much of the current scholarship on Korea’s diplomatic stance has been manufactured ex post facto. The shock of the Manchu ascendancy and Korea’s yielding to Tokugawa Japan, together with hindsight, produced truth-bending revisionist accounts in Korea that shaped later views of Sino-Korean relations and Korea’s rapprochement with Japan.

 

This study examines how Siberian exile and imprisonment turned student radicals into zealous advocates of political terrorism, seeking not only to liberate peasants from poverty but to demolish the autocracy as the defender of the privileged and propertied. Drawing on previously untapped epistolary sources (some in personal archives, some in police files), it focuses specifically on Mikhail Gots, whose family owned the Wissotzky Tea Company, his wife Vera Gassokh, and their tight-knit circle of mainly Jewish exiles called the “Viliuitsy,” best known for their famous, bloody uprising in Iakutsk in 1889. Singled out for “severe punishment as a warning to others,” the Viliuitsy concluded that state violence justified force, but also insisted on deep bonds of care for one another to resist more effectively and, more important, to reaffirm their own humanity in a harsh penal regime. Drawing on feminist carceral studies, this study explores how Russian prisons became sites for intense reading practices, political critique, epistolary creativity, queer imagination, and incubators for reimagining revolution for the folk and for themselves. The epistolary archives illuminate how this carceral education and socialist artel that the Viliuitsy organized in prison, inspired the creation and identity of the new Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which relied not only on ideology, but practices of intimacy, mutual aid, and tactics of terror, to smash tsarist oppression.

Agricultural landscapes function as cultural archives, holding centuries of accumulated knowledge visible in field boundaries, drainage patterns, and soil composition. This project explores how different ways of "reading" land shape our understanding of its history and its future. By working with regenerative farmers on the Lizard Peninsula, the research integrates multispectral and thermal remote sensing with historical tithe maps and archival cartography. Rather than treating sensor technology solely as a tool for farm productivity, this study asks humanistic questions: What becomes visible when we read land simultaneously as a historical landscape and a contemporary workplace? By placing scientific imagery in dialogue with archival records and farmers' lived experiences, the project examines how knowledge of the land is negotiated, inherited, and imagined.

My project investigates the intersection of Greek religion and the ancient economy through a case study of the temple of Apollo on the Aegean island of Delos which extended personal loans to individuals during the Hellenistic period (314-167 BCE). My work analyzes the collection of hundreds of loans that are preserved as documents carved onto marble slabs that were erected for display around this temple of Apollo. This project has entered a critical juncture where personal reading and inspection of these documents is necessary: the published versions of many of these texts could not be read with absolute certainty at the time of publication, and many texts have not received new editions since their initial publication over a century ago. Reading these documents on stone takes on even greater importance because the focus of my work is to secure precise readings of loan amounts which directly impact the understanding of the size, scale, and reach of the temple’s lending operations. My project contributes to the greater knowledge of the ancient Greek economy by arguing that religious institutions were a viable pathway for individuals to access financing. This temple’s lending practices allowed all individuals to receive loans regardless of sex, social standing, or citizenship; such practices circumvented traditional restrictions on access to wealth such as personal or familial holdings, proximity to networks to powerful individuals, or civic status. Because Apollo granted a high-volume of small loans, this project challenges the dominant narrative of the driving economic forces in antiquity as great, wealthy families and landowners as opposed to non-elites, foreigners, women, and the impoverished. 

This project is a collaboration with pastoralist and urban-based cheesemakers, along with local researchers connected with the Center for Pastoralism, to document and sustain traditional dairy practices in India while creating new opportunities for income generation. The work takes place in Arunachal Pradesh, India, where each summer, Brokpa pastoralists travel with their yak herds to high-altitude grazing areas. During this time, they make yak butter and a cheese called churpi. This year, with support from cheesemakers at Chennai-based Käse Cheese and Dibrugarh-based Queso.in, they will experiment with making European-style cheese as well for sale beyond the community. From May 2026-April 2027, the project will systematically document both the traditional and new dairy practices during this seasonal migration, as well as the exchange of knowledge and dialogue that emerges through this unique collaboration.

My new book project will apprehend the reconfiguration of French thought and literature in the 1920s and 1930s through the transdisciplinary and transnational prism of religious transfers and circulations, such as, for instance, the introduction of German phenomenology into France and the emergence of existentialism impulsed by the mediation of Protestant thinkers, as well as by a whole constellation of Russian émigrés trained in theology. In our present times, as we witness the return of religion, and more broadly, of religious schemes and forms, on the political stage, I find it important to examine the genealogy of our own modernity through the complex transfers operating between the religious and the secular and shaping our worldviews.

I will be visiting several archives in the Amherst area as part of my research into the history of land use in the Swift and Ware River watersheds. This work is the centerpiece of the narrative about the environmental legacy left by industrialization in Massachusetts that I am writing. This project follows a now defunct railroad line, exploring scenes of damage, renewal and migration along the corridor. The sources to be examined in Amherst will allow me to reconstruct the perspectives of individual mill owners and railroad executives, and I will also be consulting oral histories with the French Canadian migrants who formed a major part of the laboring population in this area as well as records of the multilingual immigrant farm families that populated these fertile valleys. These perspectives should all help me explain the most prominent features of the central Massachusetts landscape: the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs. Built between 1890 and 1940, these reservoirs anchor the water infrastructure of the state, and their construction involved the forced displacement of at least eight established communities and multiple transport routes. They are the result, in short, of an engineered redesign of the landscape that affected the entire bioregion. In the archives, I hope to unearth depictions of the lives--human and non-human--that were sacrificed to urban needs during this massive modernization project. 

The goal of this project is to promote awareness of cultural heritage and archaeology in elementary schools. This will be achieved through the creation of archaeological lesson plans and artefact kits for two elementary schools, one based in Massachusetts and the other on the island of Pantelleria, Italy. The motivation for this stems from my archaeological fieldwork on Pantelleria, where along with colleagues from other universities in the U.S., Canada, and Malta we recently completed the excavation a
project on a Punic and Roman sanctuary. Pantelleria is a small island located
approximately midway between Sicily and Tunisia. As part of this public humanities
project, I want to engage with local groups in Pantelleria to enable them to learn more
about the results of our work and its significance for the cultural heritage of the island. In
previous summers we organized “Open Days” for the public and occasional visits of
students from local schools. As part of this we will visit one of the local elementary
schools to talk with students and teachers. They will be given an artefact and tool kit,
consisting of 3D printed replicas of the objects we excavated on the island. Similarly, I
will bring another kit and undertake an outreach visit to a school in Central
Massachusetts.

Toward a Black Femme Makerspace is an arts-based, abolitionist intervention that centers Black, queer, femme, BIPOC, and LGBTQ artists in a collective process of creative production, study, and care. Drawing on abolitionist scholarship that frames freedom as a generative, world-building practice rather than solely the absence of carceral systems, this project positions artistic experimentation, embodiment, and collective joy as critical infrastructures for social change in moments of crisis.The project will convene a cohort of BIPOC and LGBTQ artists and content creators for a one-week residency in Anchorage, Alaska—an intentionally selected and unexpected geography that disrupts dominant narratives of cultural production and belonging. By relocating artists from familiar contexts of hypervisibility, precarity, and cultural extraction, the makerspace creates the conditions for reflection, risk-taking, and collaborative inquiry outside of market-driven or disciplinary frameworks.