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A transnational historian of modern Europe, Alex TIPEI is an assistant professor in the department of history and the program in international studies at the University of Montréal. She trained in the United States and France and earned her PhD from Indiana University (2016). She has previously held teaching or research positions at McGill and Princeton Universities as well as the Universities of Bucharest and Illinois. Focused primarily on Southeastern Europe and France in a global context, her research questions fundamental dichotomies—center/periphery, universal/national, developed backward, local/global—and reveal how relations between these categories are not as
straightforward as they appear.
Alex’s first monograph, Unintended Nations: How French Liberals’ Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World, is currently under review at Oxford University Press. Based on archival work in France, Romania, and Greece, the book explores how and why, after Napoleon’s defeat, Paris-based liberals formed partnerships with Orthodox elites in Southeast Europe. They used a specific discourse of civilization to describe and promote these relationships, which aimed to produce informal economic and cultural colonies in the Balkans. The study reveals the central place of these exchanges in the development of liberalism and of a liberal reform agenda in France. It likewise demonstrates how these contacts provided a framework for the articulation of nascent national identities in the Greek and the Romanian lands. Situating this history in a global context, it links these entanglements to Franco-British economic competition in the Americas and discuss how they helped crystalize the cultural, political, and biopolitical borders of Europe and the West.
Alex has published in outlets such as Modern Intellectual History, European History Quarterly, and has an article forthcoming in East European Politics and Society. She is presently working on a second monograph that traces out the role of French Saint-Simonians in the expansion of infrastructure and finance networks in Greece and Mexico. Her recent work has benefited from support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fulbright Program among other sources.
As a member of the TransCorr team, Alex looks forward to further studying the relationship between the development of (West European) modernity and the rise of specific notions of corruption in Southeast Europe as well as the way actors in the Balkans and their partners across the continent mobilized these concepts to further their discrete political and economic agendas. Alex has previously touched on this topic, contributing, for instance, the chapter, “A Corrupt Governor? Kapodistrias’s Assassination in the Francophone Press” to a new collective volume on the Greek War of Independence (ed. by Christine Phillou and Katerina Lagos, under review at Oxford University Press).
Email: [email protected]
Selected Publications:
Unintended Nations: How French Liberals’ Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World, under review Oxford University Press.
“‘And Mama Studied with Me’: Elementary Education, Modernization, Gendered Curricula, and the Reconfiguration of the Public and Private in the Danubian Principalities and Greek lands, 1810s-1840s,” East European Politics & Societies, forthcoming.
“Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization of an Idea,” in From the Napoleonic Age to the Age of Empires: Empire after the Emperor, Thomas Dodman & Aurélien Lignereux (eds.), (Palgrave, 2023).
“How to Make Friends & Influence People: Elementary Education, French ‘Influence,’ & the Balkans, 1815-40s” Modern Intellectual History, 15:3 (Nov., 2018): 621-649. “Audience Matters: ‘Civilization-Speak,’ Educational Discourses, & Balkan Nationalism, 1815-40,” European History Quarterly, 48:4 (Fall, 2018): 658-685.