About Me
(Dominique)
Before becoming a historian....
I was born in Los Angeles and raised between the vistas of the Topanga mountains and the landscapes of West Germany. I got my undergraduate degree in History from UC Berkeley. I also completed a year abroad in Bologna (Italy), where I studied Italian history, Women's Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.
Then I started working professionally...
After graduation I lived in Paris and then Rome before beginning a graduate career at Columbia University, where I specialized in Italian, Habsburg, and Balkan studies. I also spent one year researching my first book in Italy (Florence, Venice, Trieste) and three years in Croatia (Zagreb, Zadar). I received my PhD in History with Distinction in 2007, under the tutelage of Victoria de Grazia, István Deák, Volker Berghahn, Mark Mazower, Larry Wolff, and Samuel Moyn.
Then I became a professor...
In 2006-2007 I was a Remarque Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU. In 2007 I joined the history faculty at the University of Miami and received tenure in 2013. For my first and second books I completed years of research in Italy, Croatia, the UK, Germany, and the US. Right now I am President of the Central European History Society (CEHS), serve on the board of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the Journal of Austrian-American History (JAAH), the Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS), the Journal of Modern Italian Studies (JMIS), and the journal Contemporary European History. In the past, I have been an editor for the Purdue University Press book series Central European Studies, Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review, and editor for the Cambridge University Press journal Contemporary European History.
Currently, I am...
Currently, I am on leave for 2024-2025 thanks to a Senior Resident Fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK). Hopefully, by the end of this year, I will have a working manuscript of my next book: "The Habsburg Mayor of New York: Fiorello LaGuardia." I return to the University of Miami in August 2025.