Hello! Welcome to my professional website!
I am a historian of Modern Europe, modern genocides (particularly the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide), mass atrocities, incarceration, and World Wars. I look into these topics not only through the lens of culture and society, but more importantly, through the prism of the senses, ordinary people, the quotidian, childhood, and the vernacular. Accordingly, my primary goal is to advocate for the neglected significance of the quotidian and the sensate 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.
Currently, I am working on a deeper sensory history of the National Socialist Konzentrationslager system for my dissertation. I am also working on a project on the everyday life and sensory history of European Jewish refugees who arrived in the Philippines to escape the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich. The scope of my scholarly work further allows me to explore the following specific themes: the methodological value of ego-documents/first-person narratives, vernacular sources, musical sources, and material remains in narrating tragedies of the past; coming of age and losing innocence during wartime; musicking in genocidal spaces; international law; Jewish-Filipino relations; and sensory-based museum and curatorial practices.
At present, I am a fully-funded Ph.D. student and researcher/instructor at Brown University’s Department of History in Providence, Rhode Island. My writing has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, and The American Music Teacher. I have a forthcoming book chapter (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2025) on the sensory history of Armenian deportations during the Genocide of 1915 to 1923. In addition, I have also presented talks and lectures at various conferences in the United States and overseas.
I hold a Master of Arts in Music (Historical Sound Studies) and a Master of Music in Performance (Piano) degrees 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.
As a scholar who is also a professionally trained musician, one of my goals is to bring my research to a wider audience using methods from public humanities and music performance, generating both public and further scholarly engagement. Current initiatives include a storymap version of my recent public history-recital project “Music, Exile, and Genocide,” reconstruction of several compositions (including piano and vocal pieces) by KZ political prisoners Leon Kaczmarek and Josef Kropinski, an interactive sound map of 1930s Chicago through the experience of Filipino composer Nicanor Abelardo, and a remodeling and reconstruction of Konzentrationslager acoustic landscapes, via soundmapping, based on my dissertation research.
I also enjoyed a substantial career as a performer and working artist. I have graced the stages of different venues such as the Carnegie Hall, the Harpa Concert Hall, and Ganz Hall both as a chamber musician and a soloist. Between 2017-2022, I worked as a pianist/conductor for dance companies and equity theatres in Chicago and New York.