With a focus on Romania, my research explores how different political regimes mobilize various kinds of expertise to transform urban spaces in line with dominant political visions. Via archival and ethnographic research, I analyze the employment of historic neighborhoods and national museums as political sites of statecraft.
My upcoming book Socialist Heritage (to be published by Indiana University Press in December 2019) analyzes the relationship between heritage, state-formation and nationalism in communist and postcommunist Romania from 1945 until the present.
I am currently working on my second monograph, Born-Again Europeans: Memory as Capital and Ethnicity as Property in Transylvania. The book explores the de-nationalization and Europeanization of ethnicity in Transylvania through memory-work and property restitution.