Hello! Welcome to my professional website!
I am a historian broadly interested in the sensory, emotional, and everyday aspects of society, culture, and politics in the context of Modern Europe, the Holocaust, Genocide, warfare, incarceration, statelessness, and Anglo-European entanglements in Southeast Asia.
In order to center sensorial ecologies, emotional geographies, and the everyday lives 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, emotions, and the sensory world in understanding historical lived experience and causality.
I am also interested in examining complex sensory experiences—beyond the traditional modalities of vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste—such as synesthesia, dreaming, kinesthesis (sense of movement), aesthetics (sense of beauty), chronoception (sense of time), proprioception (sense of physical awareness), and equilibrioception (sense of balance) in historical time and place.
I hold an M.A. in Musicology (Historical Sound Studies) and an M.M. in Performance (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.
Research Interests: sensory history; the everyday; emotions; politics and culture of the “long” nineteenth century; Nazi Germany; Holocaust; Armenian Genocide; war and genocide; concentration and internment camps; POW camps; Western imperialism in Southeast Asia; polyphonic historiography; counterhistory ; musicology; refugee studies