See my faculty web page for further details about my research. 

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 focusses on the social and cultural history of religion, particularly Christianity, in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. 

I am presently engaged in a comparative project on the Atlantic regions of western Europe, drawing on case studies from Portugal, Galicia, and the Basque Country, through Aquitaine and Brittany, to Ireland and western Britain. This project has two main aims: firstly, to investigate the role played by monastic and ascetic structures in the institutionalisation of Christianity in these different regions; secondly, to trace the role that connectivity along the Atlantic seaboard played in cultural transmission (particularly of monastic texts) between the eastern Mediterranean and northern Europe. As part of this project, I have a strong interest in comparative historiography - that is, in understanding the ways in which different regional and national scholarly traditions have inflected our understanding of the past.

Prior to this, I worked chiefly on the Iberian Peninsula in the Suevic and Visigothic periods. My forthcoming monograph will illuminate the importance of ethical discourse in the assertion and contestation of religious power in late antique Iberia, and challenge institutionally focussed accounts of Christian history. Other publications arising from this research have addressed martyr cult, lay religion, and the history of Visigothic manuscripts.

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