Current Visiting Scholars

Click name of visiting scholar to contact.

Alison Klairmont Lingo

Research Associate


Moritz Pöllath

Visiting Student Researcher

Moritz Pöllath is an Assistant Professor of Public History at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, where he teaches courses on the History of Democracy, US History, the Cold War, and teaching history for secondary schools. His first book Out-of-Area? NATO and Decolonization in Africa and Asia 1949-1961 (2017) explores the roots of NATO’s global security policy during the early Cold War. Before joining LMU he studied Diplomatic and Military History at Hawai’i Pacific University and American History at the University of Cologne. He finished his second book (habilitation) on “Narrating Freedom: Challenges to American and German master narratives in the 21st century” in 2023. He joined the expert panel of Exploring Visual Cultures (EVC), which focuses on the concepts of Shared Heritage, Education for Sustainable Development, and Global Citizenship Education (as defined by UNESCO) to develop a first African-German schoolbook.

His current projects encompass teaching US and world history to a culturally diverse student body in combination with the application of the concept of literacy to history education. Additionally, he uses the archives of the Bancroft Library to further his research on contact between Europeans, Americans and people from Oceania in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Portrait photograph of Moritz Pöllath

Moritz Pöllath

Silvana Rachieru

Associate professor, Faculty of History, University of Bucharest
Fulbright Visiting Scholar

Silvana Rachieru holds a PhD in History (2010, University of Bucharest) and MA in History (1998, Central European University Budapest). Historian of the Ottoman Empire and specialist on social and diplomatic history of the Ottoman Empire and Romanian-Ottoman relations during “the long 19 th century”. She is director of the Center for Turkish Studies – FHUB and has expertise in cultural diplomacy and cultural management at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Istanbul (project coordinator, deputy director, director - 2006-2015). Author of articles on the Romanian-Ottoman diplomatic relations after 1878, Ottoman perspective on modernization of the Old Kingdom of Romania and modern gender history in Romania and of the book Ottoman Diplomats and Subjects in the Old Kingdom. Ottoman-Romanian Relations between 1878 1908
(Romanian, Iasi, 2018). 

Her current project in the History Department of UC Berkeley is Post-Phanariot Relationship of Ottoman Rums and Romanians at the End of the 19th century: Cultural Interactions and Regional Networks and focuses on the connections between these two elites, who played an important role on the development of both Romania and the Ottoman Empire. The main aim of this research project is to create a picture of a specific case of elite network in the region, in order to recall the transnational lives of the 19th century elites, in this case divided between Bucharest, Constantinople and main European capitals, especially Paris. Click here to view Silvana Rachieru's page on the University of Bucharest website.


Firuzan Melike Sümertaş

Assistant Professor, İstanbul Kent University

Dr. Firuzan Melike Sümertaş's research focuses on the urban/architectural/visual culture of the late Ottoman Empire and its capital city Istanbul, with a particular interest in the Greek-Orthodox community. She holds a PhD. in History from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and B.Arch and M.A degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Department of Architecture, and Program in Architectural History. Her current project in the History Department of UC Berkeley under the umbrella of the Istanpolis collaboration led by Prof. Christine Philliou, focuses on utilizing digital humanities tools for urban/architectural historical research.