Hello! Welcome to my professional website!

I am a historian broadly interested in the Holocaust, the Medz Yeghern, the relationship of warfare and mass atrocities, exile/statelessness, and incarceration. I look at these topics from a phenomenological and experiential point of view, that is, looking at the sensory, emotional, corporeal and spatial experiences of ordinary people. I am also interested in the idea of “Europe outside of Europe” and its connection with Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean; and the culture and practice of music within my research interests.

In order to center the everyday lived experience of ordinary people, I follow polyphonic historiographies that draw on a diverse array of sources, beyond traditional ones, including but not limited to life writings (such as ego-documents, first-person narratives, and testimonies), oral/vernacular sources, literature, audiovisual materials, artifacts, and residues. My primary goal, then, is to advocate for the often-undervalued significance of everyday life, the senses, emotions, bodies, and spaces in understanding historical lived experience and causality.  

Currently, I am working on research projects on the lives of ordinary Jewish refugees in the Philippines and their journey to the United States after the Second World War, the sensory worlds of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp system, and the musical life-stories of Holocaust refugees, concentration camp inmates, and Armenian Genocide survivors.

I hold an M.A. in Musicology (with a thesis on historical sound studies) and an M.M. in Performance (classical piano) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the summer of 2024, I became the first Filipino to work as a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Further, my research projects have received multiple grants from the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Mead Witter School of Music. Other research and creative projects were supported by the UW-Madison Division of the Arts. My writing has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, and The American Music Teacher.

At present, I am a History Ph.D. student at Brown University, where I also received an M.A. in History. During my free time, I also like thinking about pop and media culture.

Research Interests: history of lived experience; phenomenology; the everyday; sensory; emotions; bodies and spaces; politics and culture of the “long” nineteenth century; Nazi Germany; Holocaust; Armenian Genocide; war studies; genocide studies; concentration and internment camps; military history; POW camps; exile and refugee studies; maritime history; ocean history; polyphonic historiography; counterhistory ; sound studies; musicology; ethnomusicology; literary criticism