Meet the twenty-two new faces of the incoming cohort.
Emilien Arnaud
Areas & Interests: early modern European history; 18th century; political & legal history; French Revolution; early modern to modern Atlantic world; history of communications, digital and computational history
Emilien is interested in the comparative political and legal history of early modern Europe. His research aims to explore how the Revolutionary period shifted from a rule of monarchs to a rule of laws, by working on the chronopolitics and communication history of 18th-century parliementary systems. Emilien holds a B.A. and a M.A. in History from Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne, and an M.A. in Digital Humanities from Ecole nationale des chartes. He joins the History Department after a year as a secondary school History teacher ("Professeur agrégé") in Vitry-sur-Seine, a priority education suburb of Paris.
Hometown: Aix-en-Provence, France
Mitchell Bedows
Areas & Interests: 20th-century intellectual history, history of international thought
Mitchell is a Chicago native making the move to Jersey to study the intellectual and legal histories of modern international thought. Before coming to Princeton, he completed an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at Cambridge, writing a dissertation on the novel visions of a truly “global” law that popped up in the first half of the twentieth century—focusing especially on how these were presented through and intertwined with doctrines of realism of nationalism. In 2022, he completed his undergraduate at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, concentrating on the idea of chaos in history, philosophy, and math.
Hometown: Chicago
Nikita Bogachev
Areas & Interests: Byzantium
Ilia Calogero Curto Pelle
Areas & Interests: Byzantine studies; economic history
I am a first-year PhD student in History from Sofia, Bulgaria. My main interests are in the economic history of the Eastern Mediterranean between the 5th and 10th centuries. However, I am also interested in numismatics, societal transformations, and identity between all the different peoples and cultures of the region.
Hometown: Sofia, Bulgaria
Maximilian Diemer
Areas & Interests: Early modern Europe
Misha Grechko
Areas & Interests: Gender and sexuality, 19th-century Russian Empire, 19th-century European Empires, legal and intellectual histories
I grew up in Russia, on the industrialized landscape of the Ural Mountains. After moving to St. Petersburg in 2017, I ventured into researching perceived taboo topics—sodomy and sexual violence in 19th-century Imperial Russia—and earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the Higher School of Economics. In 2023, I received a fellowship from Bielefeld University, which allowed me to leave Russia and study in Germany. This year, I have arrived at Princeton, where I plan to expand my research further, weaving together themes of intimate governance, sexual modernity, and legal cultures across imperial terrains.
Hometown: Polevskoy
Matthew Jordan
Areas & Interests: computers, highways, rivers, atoms, bridges, brains
Matthew Jordan studies technologies that transform the way we live, from artificial intelligence to interstate highways. The people who build these technologies matter a lot — their decisions can flip markets and reshape cities — so it’s worth understanding who they are and what they value.
Above all else, Matthew's central interest is teaching. Prior to his PhD, he ran an institute that teaches tech entrepreneurs about the history of Silicon Valley, founded a walking tour company in Toronto, and helped teach a course about Taylor Swift.
Hometown: Toronto
Qurat Khan
Areas & Interests: history of science, history of math, LGBTQ history, food history
I was born in Lahore, Pakistan, but was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve lived all over the state, completing my bachelor’s degree in the mountains and my master’s on the beach. I am interested in how the AIDS epidemic changed mathematical models of diseases. Before joining the History Department, I worked remotely for Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth facilitating upper-level college mathematics course. I also conducted research for sociologist Dr. Sarah Gaby at UNC Wilmington that examined the legacy of racial violence in southern cities. My work with Dr. Gaby has supported local efforts for reparations and will be published in an upcoming edited volume.
Hometown: Raleigh, NC
Tucker Kolon
Areas & Interests: US 19th century
Ingrid Lam
Areas & Interests: 19th-century British Empire, modern Britain, East and Southeast Asia, foodways, comparative history of empire, colonialism and postcolonialism, social history
Ingrid is interested in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire in East and Southeast Asia. She aims to examine the Empire and its surrounding narratives via the lens of foodways and investigate questions of identity through following trans-regional pathways of labor, commodities, and consumption. She received her B.A. in Economics and History from the University of Chicago.
Hometown: San Francisco Bay Area
Quisqueya Lora
Areas & Interests: Latin American history, slavery, Caribbean history
Quisqueya is from the Dominican Republic. She studies Caribbean history, especially slavery and abolition between the 18th and 19th centuries with a particular interest in the history of Hispaniola (Haiti and Santo Domingo), colonial rupture, republicanism, citizenship and gender issues. She has worked in recent years as a professor at the university and high school level in Santo Domingo.
Hometown: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Mathew Madain
Areas & Interests: Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages
Zev Miklethun
Areas & Interests: US 20th century
Evan Miller
Areas & Interests: economic history, postwar 20th-century history, Cold War history
Evan Miller is from the lovely swamps of Chesapeake, Virginia. He is interested in studying international economic conferences and negotiations during the early postwar period, particularly from the Soviet perspective. He joins the History Department after a B.A. in history from the University of Virginia.
Hometown: Chesapeake, Virginia
Matt Nalefski
Areas & Interests: nineteenth-century US, abolition
Matt was born and raised in the flatlands of Central Illinois. He studies the long abolition movement and the United States' efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade, focusing on the American Colonization Society. Before joining Princeton's program this fall, he worked as a part-time as a legal assistant and college history instructor.
Hometown: Forsyth, IL
Hal Olson
Areas & Interests: 20th-century China
Hal Olson works on 20th-century China, with a particular interest in writing systems, language reform movements, and nation building. He comes to Princeton after two years in public history, first at Old Fort Jackson in Savannah, Georgia, and then at Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz, New York. He holds a BA in History and Chinese from Williams College.
Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia
Deborah Rabinovich
Areas & Interests: US 20th century
Disha Ray
Areas & Interests: South Asian history, history of medicine and health, gender and sexuality, colonialism
Disha is interested in exploring the history of reproduction and women's healthcare in colonial and post colonial South Asia. More broadly, her interests lie in the histories of different medical traditions, their interactions and conflicts in the modern world.
Hometown: Delhi
Sydney Shiller
Areas & Interests: modern central and eastern Europe, social history, modern Jewish history
Sydney's research focuses on modern central and eastern Europe, with a particular interest in nineteenth-century Poland and Ukraine. She recently completed her MA at the University of Toronto, where her capstone research dealt with political relations between national minorities in Austrian Galicia before the First World War.
Hometown: Toronto, Canada
Grace Smith
Areas & Interests: science - medicine, psychiatry, technology; 20th-century US
Grace is excited to call NJ her sixth home-state of the last five years. She studied neuroscience and the social foundations of health at Duke and Vanderbilt, respectively, and has worked in non-profit, clinical, and research contexts across these and other disciplines. She is interested in psychiatric knowledge-production in the modern Global North, and particularly in the tools and technologies that reify and reproduce that knowledge.
Hometown: Columbia, SC
Ying Xing
Areas & Interests: France 20th-century intellectual history
Ying Xing got her BA in French Language and Literature at Sun Yat-sen University and MA in European and Russian Studies at Yale University. Her research interests cover modern European intellectual history, transnational history, and postcolonial theory. Ying is working on the global spread of Maoism, with a focus on the entangled history between France and China in the 20th century.
Hometown: China