I am a US and global historian, specializing in the history of international organizations, infrastructure, US foreign relations, and ideas.

My book project, titled The World’s Headquarters: The United States, the United Nations, and the Place of Global Governance, 1945-1991, is a study of place and power. It investigates the cultural, social, and political implications of anchoring the post-World War II global governance system in New York. Drawing on archives from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and India, as well as oral histories I conducted with former UN personnel, I show how locating the UN in New York opened a portal between the domestic and foreign, through which tens of thousands of diplomats, international civil servants, their spouses and children, and more entered. My book argues that, thanks to the headquarters, many processes that we typically consider to be “domestic” history, such as McCarthyism, have an international history and that international processes, such as decolonization, have an overlooked American history.

My writing has appeared in, among other outlets, Diplomatic History, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Bloomberg.

I have been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Scholarship, the Mackenzie King Traveling Fellowship, and the Truman Library Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Public History

• “Ambassadors to the Public: 70 Years of Guided Tours of the UN Headquarters” exhibit, November 2022, UN Visitor Lobby, UN headquarters in New York, and online.
• New Books in History podcast channel, the New Books Network
  • I conduct long-form interviews with scholars about their research. Some of my guests include Quinn Slobodian, Heidi Tworek, Kiran Klaus Patel, Or Rosenboim, Christopher Dietrich, Jeffrey Byrne, and Sam Moyn.

Refereed Journal Articles

• “Stewards of Internationalism: United Nations Tour Guides, Gender, and Public Diplomacy, 1952–1977,” Diplomatic History 48:3 (2024).
• “Geopolitics Turned Inwards: The Princeton Military Studies Group and the National Security Imagination,” Diplomatic History 43:4 (2019).

Essays

• “The United Nations Is Losing Favor With Its Former Cheerleader,” Bloomberg Weekend Edition (2025).
• “The Strange Career of ‘National Security’,” The Atlantic (2019).

Reviews

• “How American Culture Ate the World,” New Republic (2022).
• H-Diplo Roundtable XXIII-20 on Wertheim. Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, H-Diplo (2020).
• “Wendell Willkie’s World Without Borders,” New Republic (2020).
• “The Department of Everything Else,” Los Angeles Review of Books.