I am a historian of the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Caucasus. My research has two main strands:
- The history of slavery in the Black Sea, and its connections with the wider Mediterranean and Afro-Eurasian world;
- The history of polities on the borderlands of the Byzantine Empire, notably in the Caucasus, and their interrelationship.

I did my PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on the North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, supervised by Prof. Hugh Kennedy and Dr. Teresa Bernheimer. I then taught at Saint Xavier University and Wilbur Wright College in Chicago, USA, before moving to Ghent University in Belgium in 2019. From 2021 to 2024, I held an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship, which investigated comparisons and links between the medieval Black Sea slave trade and political developments in 14th-15th century Egypt and West Africa.

My book, 'The North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, 850-1240', will be published this summer (2025) by Cambridge University Press. This introduces the Kingdom of Alania, the most powerful polity in the medieval North Caucasus, to a Western European and North American audience. It argues that it was possible for this kingdom to exercise sovereignty over the North Caucasus without a state structure, thus challenging the narrative which connects the rise of kingdoms on the Byzantine periphery to top-down Christianisation and state formation.