Hello! Welcome to my professional website!

I am a historian broadly interested in the Holocaust, the Medz Yeghern, the relationship of modern war and mass atrocities, as well as the history of modern Europe, maritime Asia, and the Pacific Worlds. I look at these topics from phenomenological, experiential, embodied prisms, i.e., looking at the sensory, emotional, corporeal, spatial, material, temporal, and relational experiences of ordinary people.

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.  

My primary research traces the transcontinental and transoceanic history of ordinary Jewish individuals and families who fled Nazi-occupied Europe, sought refuge in the Philippine Commonwealth, endured the Japanese occupation, and later migrated to the United States after World War II. By following their quasi-circumnavigational trajectories, I explore how these refugees experienced displacement through intimate themes of everyday life and lived experience, kinship and family networks, relations with native peoples and colonial populations, and the making of lifeworlds across shifting regimes and terrains. This project also engages questions of transnational solidarity, Jewish identity, antisemitism, biological memory, and postmemory as well as the continuities and discontinuities of historical lived experience, i.e., interrogating how these life-stories and experiences were carried, remembered, narrated, and transferred across generations.

I am also working on projects regarding the 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