Contact Information
810 S. Wright Street
M/C 466
Urbana, IL 61801
Office Hours
Research Interests
Central and Eastern Europe
The Habsburg Monarchy, 1740-1918
Nationalism and Imperialism
Myth and Memory
Research Description
My work focuses on the symbolic role of the monarch in the Bohemian Crownlands of the Habsburg Monarchy in the decades before its dissolution. The growing conflict between Czech and German nationalists was all in the shadow of a large bureaucratic state that tried to quell tensions by fostering loyalty to Franz Joseph, the penultimate monarch. At times, this monarchism worked in tandem with nationalist feelings, but the ideas were also frequently at odds. My research examines the relationship between nationalism and monarchism and the state’s efforts to garner popular support through loyalty to the emperor.
Education
Ph.D., History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2021
M.A., History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2017
B.A., History, University of Chicago, 2013
Grants
Fulbright U.S. Student Grant, Czech Republic, 2017-2018
Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, History Department, UIUC, 2016
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow (Czech), Academic Years 2015-2017, Summers 2015, 2016, 2017
Courses Taught
HIST 200: Introduction to Historical Interpretation: Nationalism
HIST 200: Introduction to Historical Interpretation: Monarchy
HIST 253: Enlightenment to Existentialism
HIST 258: 20th Century to Midcentury: World War I
HIST 350: 19th Century Romanticism and Politics
HIST 353: European History 1918 to 1939
HIST 354: Twentieth Century History in Prague (co-taught with Stefan Djordjevic)
HIST 361: European Thought and Society since 1789: The Nation in History
HIST 365: Fiction and the Historical Imagination
HIST 498: Research and Writing Seminar: Empires
Recent Publications
“Continuity and modernity? The cult of Franz Joseph in the Bohemian Crownlands.” In Modernizing the Unmodern: Europe’s Imperial Monarchies and their Path to Modernity in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh eds., Palgrave Studies in Modern Monarchy. (2025)
“To Promote and Protect: Everyday Monarchism among Teachers and Prosecutors in the Bohemian Crownlands, 1869 – 1914.” In Habsburg Civil Servants: Between Civil Society and the State, Daša Lučen and Alexander Maxwell, eds., Berghahn Books. (2025)
“An (In)Sidious Image: Palpatine, Napoleon, and Propaganda,” Historifans, September 2022, https://historifans.org/2022/09/26/an-insidious-image-palpatine-napoleon-and-propaganda/