Faculty Research Interests

My research interests are immigrants, workers, and working-class cultures in the 20th century U.S. It was as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University when I learned the value of social history ("history from the bottom up"), the importance of cultural identity, and became fascinated by the histories of immigrants and labor. I focused on both fields in my graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, and my dissertation took up industrial relations in the coal mining industry, welfare capitalism, and migrations of southern and eastern European immigrants to a 'model' town in western Pennsylvania in Finding Stability in a Company Town: A Community Study of Slickville, Pennsylvania, 1916-1943. 

My current research focuses on Croatian Americans during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War, and just how they used transnational networks to conjure ethnic and class-based activism for economic justice at home (in the U.S.) and for political freedom abroad (in the former Yugoslavia).

My research interests include urban space and urban populations with a particular focus on the human/environment relationship, urban planning and social geography, and transnational exchange and adaption of ideas about nature and cities. 

I am working on two research projects: One examines the assignation of meaning to and responsibility for public space through an examination of a particular park location that became a suicide destination in fin de sicle Paris. The other work considers Franco-British greenspace design and exchange from 1660–1880.

My research interests include the history of social and political movements, women's activism, anti-fascism, and pacifism. My current book project analyzes the political work of over twenty different British women’s organizations that opposed the rise of fascist regimes in Europe beginning in the early 1930s. While some former militant suffragists joined fascist organizations in Britain, British women’s organizations overwhelmingly understood fascism as the single largest menace to women’s rights. In the years before and during the Second World War, British women’s organizations used the threat posed by fascism to legitimize their engagement in political discourses and to emphasize the importance of protecting the democratic rights that women had fought for decades to obtain.

My research interests include modern Chinese history, race and ethnicity, and transnational history. I have published a number of book chapters, journal articles, and book reviews in these fields. I am currently working on a book manuscript on the history of Muslims in China.

I am primarily interested in how people from Africa, the Americas, and Europe created a new world for all in the centuries following Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. 

My first book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025. I am now studying how familial, financial, and political considerations intersected in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. By studying the lives of several generations of the influential Martin family, “Antigua at the Center of the World: The Martin Family and a Violent Atlantic,” will offer new insights into the very personal decisions that shaped the culture and politics of Britain’s empire.

Since coming to Widener, I have also engaged in conversations with Chester community members regarding the city’s history. I research and present on topics ranging from William Penn’s landing to civil rights protests that engulfed the city (and Widener campus) in the early 1960s.