Research
At the center of my research is a question: how do ideas become forces in public life? I follow concepts and narratives as they cross borders, move between religious and secular traditions, and travel from the written page into institutions and collective action. Again and again, I return to moments when inherited languages are placed under pressure—by religious conflict, reform, revolution, or social upheaval—and are redefined for new political purposes.
My work stretches from the religious polemics of the seventeenth century to the conspiracy theories of the modern world, while remaining centered on Europe and the Atlantic world from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century.
Catholicism, Counterrevolution, and Modern Politics
My first book asks what happens to a religious tradition when the political institutions that once sustained it begin to disappear. As reforming states and revolutions dismantled the old confessional order, Catholics did not simply defend inherited beliefs or wait for restoration. They developed new languages, networks, and forms of organization through which to act in public life.
Following writers, clerics, and activists across Europe and the Americas, The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780–1849 shows Catholicism becoming a modern ideological formation. More broadly, it uses the Catholic Counterrevolution to examine how movements defined by opposition can nevertheless become engines of innovation: appropriating liberty and rights, reimagining nationhood and international order, and learning to mobilize mass publics.
Explore the BookConspiracy Theories and the Politics of Explanation
My current project, Power and Paranoia: A History of Conspiracy Theories, traces the making of modern conspiracy thinking from the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century to the present. Rather than treating conspiracy theories simply as irrational beliefs, I examine the historical work they perform: turning bewildering political and social change into stories of intention, assigning responsibility to hidden actors, and giving communities enemies against whom to define themselves.
The project begins with two seventeenth-century fabrications whose lives far exceeded the moments that produced them. One chapter follows the Monita privata, a seventeenth-century forgery that presented itself as a set of secret instructions for the Jesuits. By portraying the Jesuit order as a hidden, centralized system of command—a dark double of the emerging modern state—the Monita made new forms of bureaucratic power easier to imagine and fear. Another chapter reconstructs the Bourgfontaine plot, also a seventeenth-century invention, which became especially popular in the eighteenth century, as the Enlightenment and the spread of unbelief seemed to confirm its claim that Jansenist leaders had secretly planned Christianity’s destruction. Both translated diffuse historical transformations into stories about hidden authors and deliberate plans. They remained powerful not because they were impervious to refutation—far from it—but because they were modular and open-ended: they could absorb new actors, documents, and crises without losing their basic form.
That modularity made the French Revolution a crucial turning point. Older religious conspiracy traditions were fused with allegations of plots by Enlightenment philosophers and freemasons, producing a new master narrative in which apparently separate enemies became branches of a single conspiracy behind revolutionary upheaval. The project traces how this composite model fed anti-Jacobin, anti-Masonic, and eventually antisemitic explanations—and why its basic structures have proved so adaptable and so difficult to dislodge.
Ideas in Motion
A recurring strand of my research examines what happens when political ideas cross boundaries—between revolution and counterrevolution, religious and secular traditions, learned debate and popular politics. Concepts such as democracy, liberty, rights, duties, and nationhood do not carry fixed meanings. As they change hands and enter new settings, historical actors redefine them, attach them to new foundations, and turn them toward purposes their earlier advocates did not anticipate.
One part of this work follows ideas as they cross ideological lines. In a 1797 Christmas homily delivered under a revolutionary republic hostile to the church, Cardinal Gregorio Chiaramonti—the future Pope Pius VII—recast democracy in Christian terms. The homily circulated across Europe and, in Spanish translation, the Americas; readers took it as evidence that Catholicism could coexist with new republican institutions. Related research on rights and duties examines what happens when divine and natural-law foundations come to compete with—and sometimes give way to—appeals to reason, positive law, or individual autonomy, and whether the language of duties can mediate between individual claims and visions of social interdependence. My work on Catholic medievalism explores how Catholics repurposed the past as a field of political experiment, using history, as Enlightenment thinkers had before them, to diagnose the present and imagine alternative futures.
Another part follows ideas as they leave learned circles and enter wider social worlds. My early research on revolutionary Italy traced political concepts as they were recast as popular propaganda, debated and practiced in clubs, taught through new forms of political education, and enacted in festivals, rituals, and collective emotions. That work led me to approach ideas not simply as arguments on the page, but as practices through which people create publics, loyalties, enemies, and possible futures.
Across all my work, I move between the small circles in which concepts and narratives first take shape and the wider publics through which they acquire political life—following them from books and correspondence into sermons, newspapers, associations, classrooms, rituals, and political performances.
Publications