Essays
Long-form explorations of cultural memory, place, and meaning. Each essay connects themes, places, and routes through narrative, drawing on archival sources and lived experience.
Mitteleuropa: Empire and Memory
The Habsburg Imagination and Its Long Aftermath
The Habsburg Empire dissolved in 1918, but its ghost haunts the cities it created. Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Krakow—these cities still speak a common language of architecture, music, and café culture that no political border has been able to silence.
The Classical Inheritance
What Europe Learned from Antiquity—and What It Forgot
The Grand Tour was not merely a journey; it was a theory of education. When young Europeans traveled from Edinburgh to Athens in search of antiquity and enlightenment, they were making an argument about what civilization required. That argument still shapes us.
Memory and the Map of Jewish Europe
Two Thousand Years of Presence, Catastrophe, and Survival
From the Sephardic scholars of Thessaloniki to the Vilna Gaon's Lithuania, Jewish communities shaped European civilization for two millennia. The Holocaust nearly erased that world. What remains—and what it demands of us—is the subject of this essay.
The Iron Curtain: Then and Now
Memory, Division, and Reconciliation in Contemporary Europe
An exploration of how the physical remnants of the Iron Curtain have been transformed from instruments of division into monuments of memory and spaces of reconciliation.
Walking as Transformation
The Enduring Power of Pilgrimage in Modern Europe
Why thousands still walk Europe's ancient pilgrimage routes, seeking not religious salvation but personal meaning, cultural connection, and the transformative power of movement through landscape.
Jazz and the Geography of Freedom
Migration, Music, and the Making of American Culture
From Congo Square to Harlem, the story of jazz is inseparable from the Great Migration and the African American struggle for freedom and cultural expression.