Research Interests: Economic History; U.S. History; Entrepreneurship; Technology and Innovation; History of Economic Thought

Isabel’s research focuses on the history of economic development in the United States, with a particular interest in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She aims to contribute to a historically grounded understanding of innovation, entrepreneurship, and modern economic theory. Isabel holds a B.A in History of Science with a Secondary in Economics from Harvard College, where she studied the economic history and management structure of nineteenth-century plantation slavery. Before coming to Brown, she was Coordinator of the Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School, where she co-wrote a bibliographic guide to the history of U.S. industrial slavery with Walter Friedman for the Business History Review.

Relevant links: A Guide to the History of Industrial Slavery in the United States

Research Interests: Modern Middle East and Mediterranean; Social History; Cultural History; History of Alcohol and Food

Frank is currently working to pair academic research on alcohol with active engagement with the current alcohol production and consumption landscape in the region through his work as an importer of alcohol products from the Ancient World at Terra Sancta Trading. Frank's hope is to combine his research and business endeavors into a unified project that helps to both foster understanding of alcohol history of the region and support the families continuing the historical tradition of production find success in the global market.

Research Interests: Indigenous History; Environmental History; Wildfire; Oral History; Indigenous storytelling; Pacific Northwest; Capitalism; Natural Disasters; Cultural Burning

Courtney's research examines Indigenous coexistence with wildfire through cultural burning, and how this knowledge is transmitted orally.

Research Interests: History of Capitalism; Money; Racism and Slavery; US History; Early Modern Atlantic World

Nick’s research concerns the imbrication of money and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from Haverford College and an M.A. in Human Geography from the University of British Columbia.

Research Interests: African American History; Black Atlantic; marronage; fugitivity; gender; African diaporic spirituality

Erin received her Bachelors in English, Economics, and African American and Diaspora Studies from Vanderbilt University. She continued her studies at Yale University and Louisiana State University where she received a Master of Arts in Religion and Master of Arts in Liberal Arts respectively. Throughout her studies, she developed an increasing interest in African American freedom efforts. Her current research focuses on marronage in the Louisiana territory during its colonial and antebellum periods.

Research Interests: History of Medicine; Atlantic World; Indigenous History; Early Modern Material Culture; Epistemology

Drew received her B.A. from Denison University and M.A. from Bard Graduate Center. She worked as an archaeologist for the National Park Service in northern Minnesota and southeastern Alaska, and as a Repatriation Specialist for the Field Museum where she helped return cultural items and ancestral human remains to Native Nations and Indigenous communities around the world. Her research interests lie in examining how North American Indigenous ontologies and practices of healing were translated into use by Early Modern medical practitioners in Western Europe. She plans to continue exploring how methodologically embodied research can be used to examine cultural hybridity and support inclusive histories of medicine. 

Research Interests: Africa; Ghana/West Africa History; Environmental History; Colonial History; Indigenous Knowledge System; Politics of Forest Management and Conservation; Public Health Campaigns

Daniel is interested in studying West African environmental history. This passion led him to focus his master’s thesis on forest management in the Gold Coast titled “'Dual System': Forest Management in the Gold Coast 1920s-1940s.” In this work, Daniel examined the politics of forest management highlighting how forests were managed by a dual system through colonial policies and Native Authorities. His work shows how forest management was negotiated and incorporated indigenous forestry practices alongside western methods introduced by the Colonial Authorities. And by examining this dual system, Daniel’s work extends the discourse on Ghanaian forest history beyond the dominant theme of a simple resistance narrative. Building on this foundation, his upcoming Ph.D. dissertation intends to show how forest management was deployed as a tool to respond to the colonial perception of West Africa as a “diseased environment.” With this, he aims to show the interplay between forest management and public health interventions in the Gold Coast.

Research Interests: Sensory history; Nazi Germany; Holocaust; Armenian Genocide; perpetrators; culture; everyday life; childhood; migration; ego-documents; artifacts; museums; solidarity; comparative literature; sound studies; musicology

James Carl Lagman Osorio’s research breathes life into the sensate worlds of the Nazi Konzentrationslager system in Germany and Austria–particularly the camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen. Dovetailing historical methods and literary criticism with approaches from related social disciplines, James attunes the sensoria of inmates and perpetrators as heuristic leitmotifs to orchestrate a deep sensory history of activity, entropy, modernity, humanity, and anti-humanity in the KZ system. A counterhistory grounded primarily in ego-documents and artifacts of ordinary people, his research aims to rupture metanarratives and demonstrate how centering the life and afterlife of the senses reveals polyphonic attitudes, textured dynamics, and spectral echoes of concentrationary experience. Other interests include the Armenian Genocide, coming of age and cultural youth labor in Nazi camps, musicking and genocide, Jewish-Filipino relations, and sensory museology. Originally from Tarlac, Philippines, James holds master’s degrees in musicology and performance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he wrote an acoustic history of KZ Dachau for his M.A. thesis and presented a public history-recital project interlacing audiovisual survivor testimonies with his performances of music related to the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. In addition, his scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, among others.

Research Interests: Kinship and the history of the Family; late Medieval Mediterranean; Medieval Islamic world; Social History; Historical Anthropology; Interreligious interactions

Maya's work aims to reconstruct kinship relations and models in the late Medieval Mediterranean world by exploring Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin sources.

Research Interests: Puerto Rico; 20th century Caribbean history; surveillance studies; colonialism and empire; policing and police archives; historical memory; Public Humanities; archives and archival studies

Claudia Ojeda holds a bachelor of arts in History and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino/a Studies from Haverford College. Her research explores ties between liberalism and repression in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico through surveillance files compiled by the police against individuals involved in nationalist and pro-independence movements on the island.

Research Interests: The role of Holocaust and Soviet historical trauma in Belarus’ post-Soviet national identity formation

Delving into history, memory, and trauma throughout her M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University, through psychoanalytic study, as a 2023 Summer Graduate Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and by 9 Russian-language testimonies from Soviet Holocaust survivors, as a Belarusian native, Vesta has noted that manifold ways of tackling Holocaust and Soviet historical trauma appear to play a role in the democratization of post-Soviet states along the Central Eastern European borderlands. The approaches to trauma in the national identity formation of Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, as well as the evolution of those approaches over the last 30 years, illustrate a movement toward or away from the Russian sphere. A lingering fear permeates Belarusian society: a yoke that maintains the political status quo and the presence of Belarus' dictatorship. Vesta hopes to explore that fear.

Research Interests: Modern Europe; Intellectual History; Environmental History; History of Science; Eastern Europe; the Russian Empire

Giorgi is interested in the history of environmental observation and collective empiricism. His research explores how environmental knowledge and data are gathered, circulated, and contested, and what happens to them when the structures and circumstances that produced them change or cease to exist. Giorgi aims to study these processes through following the emergence and development of natural and environmental sciences in the Russian Empire and their transformation in the post-imperial South Caucasus. He holds a B.Sc. from Cornell University and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago, both in environmental sciences.