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, Istvan Deak, 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. Currently I am an editor for the Purdue University Press book series Central European Studies and until recently I was an Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review. I was an editor for the Cambridge University Press journal Contemporary European History from 2015-2020 and I now serve on the journal's board. I now also serve on the board of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the Journal of Austrian-American History (JAAH), the Executive Committee of the Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS), and am Vice-President of the Central European History Society (CEHS).
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.