PhD Candidate
Late Modern Europe
I am a historian of Eastern Europe. I have always been fascinated by how the modern world has been shaped by and shapes the history of previous periods, especially in the region between Russia and Germany. Before coming to Berkeley, I received my MA in Medieval Studies from Fordham University. I wrote my MA thesis on the conquest of Cyprus by the forces of the Third Crusade in 1191 and presented research on topics related to Byzantine law and identity. Since coming to Berkeley in fall 2023, I have continued my interdisciplinary work, studying Ancient Greek literature, Old Church Slavonic, and papyrology alongside my coursework and teaching on the twentieth century. In the summer of 2024, I participated in the 12th Biennial Medieval Slavic Summer Institute at the Ohio State University. The following summer, I was a fellow in the 2025 Monterrey Summer Symposium on Russia sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which took place in three locations in Georgia and Armenia. After participating in the program, I studied Polish at the Catholic University of Lublin. During the academic year 2026-27, I will be a visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, where I will conduct archival work for my dissertation project on the social and cultural transformation of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1970s and 80s.
Dissertation Project
My dissertation examines how Ukrainian nationalism in western Ukraine transformed from the integral, illiberal nationalism of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the 1940s into the liberal national democracy of the Lion Society and Ruch movement by the late 1980s. Focusing on developments in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil oblasts between 1947 and 1994, with a particular focus on the late 1970s and 80s, I ask why and how the heartland of the UPA armed insurgency became the birthplace of Ukraine's peaceful democratic revival. My work traces this transformation by exploring the interaction of three simultaneous developments: the Soviet-era socioeconomic modernization of Galicia, which displaced the OUN's rural, ethnically exclusive constituency and created a new Ukrainian-speaking urban professional class; the shifting politics of Soviet nationalities policy and its reception among local party officials, cultural institutions, and dissident networks; and the transatlantic ideological dialogue between the Ukrainian diaspora and activists inside Soviet Ukraine. Drawing on Ukrainian, North American, and European archival collections, my dissertation project seeks to recover the specific institutional mechanisms and contingent choices through which a movement once defined by antisemitism and ethnic cleansing reoriented itself around parliamentary democracy and individual rights. My research speaks to broader questions about when nationalism reinforces liberal democracy and when it undermines it—questions that the Ukrainian experience over the past four years has made urgently relevant.
Publications
- “‘In Good Faith and without Bad Intention’: Oaths, ritual, and law in Richard the Lionheart’s 1191 conquest of Cyprus,” Journal of Medieval History, 53:2 (May 2027): https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2026.2647155
- “The Izbornik Sviatoslava,” in “The Material Culture of the Medieval Black Sea,” Medieval Black Sea Project, edited by Teresa Shawcross et al., https://medievalblackseaproject.princeton.edu/the-izbornik-sviatoslava-daniel-berardino/
- Review of Uri Zvi Shachar, A Pious Beligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Comitatus 53 (2022)
- With Clifford J. Rogers et al., “Investigating the Outcome of Sieges During the Hundred Years’ War: A Quantitative Reconnaissance,” Medieval Warfare Magazine, 11:6 (2022): 24-36
Teaching
- Reader, History Department, UC Berkeley, Spring 2026
- History 167C: Modern Germany: Germany 1914 to the Present, Professor Stefan Laffin
- Teaching Assistant, History Department, UC Berkeley, Fall 2025
- History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present, Professor Ethan Shagan
- Teaching Assistant, Political Science Department, UC Berkeley, Spring 2025
- PS140L: The Rise and Demise of World Communism, Professor George Breslauer
Education
MA, Fordham University, Medieval Studies, 2023
