Profile
Cristian is a historian of the global twentieth century with research interests in disaster studies, migration, economic life, and humanitarianism. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 2020. His current book project is based on his dissertation, titled Giving in the Time of Socialism: Economic Life, Humanitarianism, and Mobility in the Global Postwar. His work traces how natural disasters, economic austerity, and refugee crises became transformative moments of private solidarity in Ceausescu’s Romania between 1970-1989. Through the lens of historical ethnography, Cristian’s research examines informal practices of aid, care, and hospitality by private humanitarians, including social workers, feminist activists, diasporic communities, and many other volunteers in East-Central Europe.
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Drawing on official archives and oral histories from five countries in Europe and the United States, Cristian's work expands the subjects and sites that count in the emergent literature on humanitarianism. His book recuperates how the idea of humanity became a bedrock in the social lives of ordinary people after 1945, repeatedly moving such seemingly peripheral places as Romania from the margins of the Cold War to the center of the imageries and ethical aspirations of a broader international public. To this day, these vernacular forms of aid-giving in Eastern Europe and the Global South coexist alongside, but often in the shadow of, a Western aid internationalism. Funding from the University of Michigan and various international fellowships, including a Fulbright-IIE, Mellon-SSRC IDRF, and ASEEES Research Grant, have supported his research.
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Cristian has recently written about post-disaster ethics in Romania's Western migrant communities in East European Politics and Societies. His writing has also appeared in a variety of public outlets such as The Conversation, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today. During his postdoctoral tenure, Cristian also serves as the Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary research team funded by a health equity grant from the Population Health Initiative at the University of Washington. This project studies how low-income students of color engage with online education during COVID-19. This collaborative effort seeks to theorize how the global pandemic has magnified existing educational inequities along class and race in marginalized communities in the United States. At the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Cristian is the co-organizer of the webinar and workshop series and the creator of humanitarianisms.org.
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Selected Writing
“Migrants into Humanitarians: Ethnic Solidarity and Private Aid-Giving during Romania’s Historic Flood of 1970,” in East European Politics and Societies 34:2 (June 2020).
“Lethargic Global Response to COVID-19: How the Human Brain’s Failure to Assess Abstract Threats Cost us Dearly” (with Arash Javanbakth), in The Conversation, April 27, 2020
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“Continuing Politics by Other Means: Giving in Cold War Europe,” International Journal of History, Culture and Modernity 6:1 (2018), 105-133.
“Poor People Die Younger in the U.S. That Skews American Politics” (with Javier Rodríguez), in The Washington Post, May 31, 2018.
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