​I am an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, jointly appointed to the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies and the Faculty of Information. I am also affiliated with the Tri-Campus Graduate History Department, the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. I previously taught at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, West Virginia University, and George Mason University. I am a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, past President (2024-26) of the Society for Italian Historical Studies, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

I earned an M.A. in Social Sciences and a Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago, and my B.A. at Wesleyan University in Classics and the College of Letters. I also studied at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.

My intellectual pursuits are constantly evolving. As an undergraduate, I studied classical philology, archaeology, philosophy, and history. This ultimately led to graduate work in modern representations of the classical tradition and the politics of museums and archaeology, particularly in the context of twentieth-century Europe. This trajectory culminated in my first book, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy, which explores the Fascist idea of Rome (romanità) and the role played by museologists, archaeologists, scholars, and urban planners in its development and promotion.

From studying Fascist political culture, I turned to work on its enduring material and discursive traces in contemporary Italy. To this day, it is not uncommon to encounter monuments, buildings and iconography erected by Mussolini’s regime across Italy, and the Fascist period has increasingly been cast in nostalgic, heritagizing and valourizing terms by forces hostile to pluralism and liberal democracy. My forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, Forty-Five Days: The Fall of Mussolini and Italy's Reckoning with Fascism, situates these issues historically by turning to the immediate aftermath of Mussolini’s regime in July 1943, and reconstructing episodes of iconoclasm, interpersonal confrontations, and retributive violence. I also explored related questions in a transnational and comparative context, alongside my collaborator Lilia Topouzova, in our SSHRC Connection Grant-funded project ​Authoritarianism: Lives, Legacies, Traumas.

As these various projects suggest, I am especially interested in the politics of memory and the institutions and processes through which they are expressed, from museums, archaeology and monuments to everyday acts of preservation and iconoclasm. Our mnemonic reconstructions are themselves historically contingent, telling us more about ourselves as they do about the past. This emphasis opens space for public engagement; see for example a discussion of my work in the New Yorker; my talk on controversial monuments for the World Monuments Fund; my remarks on the January 6th assault on the Capitol; and my comments in the New York Times on political iconography in the Trump administration.