I am a historian of photography, visual art, and museum and heritage practices. My research considers how photography developed in tandem with industrialization, colonial and imperial expansion (especially in North Africa and the Middle East), and ideas of heritage preservation. I view photographic archives and museum collections not as dead legacies of these pasts, but as living expressions of them which, as historians, we have a responsibility to analyze, evaluate, and confront.

My research centres on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD, the theory of quarks and gluons) and how to use it in order to advance our understanding of the fundamental particles and interactions of the universe.

My work is mostly directed towards high-energy particle colliders, notably the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, with applications in studies of the Higgs boson, searches for new particles, precision measurements of fundamental constants and studies of heavy-ion collisions.

I work on early twentieth-century literature and culture, and am especially interested in the relationship between experience, writing and emotion in times of conflict. My first book examined the role of the senses, particularly touch, in First World War experience and literature, while my recent work has focussed on the colonial dimensions of war culture and memory through an expanded notion of the 'archive' - artefacts, photographs, paintings, rumours, folksongs and sound-recordings, as well as testimonial, political and literary writings. Having just completed a monograph on India and First World War culture, I am about to begin work on two projects: the Oxford Book of Colonial Writings of the First World War and a monograph on the experience and imaginings of sea-voyages in a global context, from Victorian times to now.

My research focuses on the history of lay religion in the Iberian Peninsula from the Late Roman Empire to the end of the Visigothic kingdom in 711. The idea of 'lay religion' - religion as experienced by people who were not clerics – draws us away from institutional histories of religion, and adds an important social dimension to our understanding of a period in which socio-economic and cultural history are too often kept apart. The central questions centre on how laypeople and clerics made their different claims to power in the religious sphere, and how the nature of their conflicts and collaborations changed over time. This entails thinking critically and historically about the very concepts of 'religion', 'superstition', 'secular' and so on - all of which had the capacity to be used fluidly and polemically.

I work in philosophy of language and neighboring fields. For more information and publications, please visit https://mandelkern.hosting.nyu.edu/.