I work on Greek history from the eighteenth century to the present. My research primarily focuses on efforts to refashion systems of sovereignty in the eastern Mediterranean during the Russo-Ottoman wars of the late eighteenth century. It also considers the impact of such endeavors on notions of selfhood, definitions of belonging, and political imagination. The four projects I am currently developing are described below:

I.  The Russian Mediterranean: Shaping Sovereignty and Selfhood on the Island of Paros, 1768-1789 (under contract with Edinburgh University Press).

In recent years, the field of intellectual history has witnessed a wave of groundbreaking works, as scholars have responded to the global and spatial “turns” in innovative ways. Focusing upon new scales of interaction, pioneering works in global intellectual history trace vast networks of intellectual production and information exchange, challenge Eurocentric accounts of the Enlightenment, and highlight the capacity of local actors to repurpose foreign ideas. Within the field of Mediterranean history, novel works highlight the role of travelling intellectuals as agents of transmission, translation, and reformulation, while others gesture toward the need for more inclusive histories that consider the role of “trans-imperial subjects” in intellectual production. The Russian Mediterranean contributes to this scholarship through an examination of legal arguments advanced by – and on behalf of – a motley crew of mercenaries, merchants, militant priests, prisoners of war, privateers, rebels, refugees, and slaves who congregated on the Aegean islands during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774. These trans-imperial actors interacted with diplomats, jurists, legislators, locals, military officers, and pashas who traversed expansive networks of information exchange and transmitted their novel ideas to noteworthy commentators like Edmund Burke, Giacamo Casanova, and Voltaire, as well as Platon Levshin, Iosipos Moisiodax, Canikli Ali Paşa, Alexander Radishchev, Giovanni Del Turco, and Eugenios Voulgaris. The book’s central conceit is that the manner in which this latter group of authors conceptualized sovereignty and selfhood was heavily informed by the circulation, translation, and reframing of concepts within transformational spaces on the peripheries of empires. It portrays Paros (the capital of a semi-autonomous polity that existed in the Aegean Sea from 1770 to 1775), as one of these transformational spaces, and aims to recast the island as an important site of conceptual production. By studying the legal claims and the movements of the eclectic group of adventurers, litigants, petitioners, prisoners, and supplicants that congregated in the capital of the short-lived Russian Archipelagic Principality alongside the commentary of intellectual giants of the era, this work signals the need for a new kind of intellectual microhistory; one which recenters such sites of encounter and recovers the intellectual universes their inhabitants forged.

The stories in this study center upon the responses of a diverse generation of trans-imperial actors to the failure of the Russian and Ottoman Empires to present the Christian inhabitants of the Aegean Islands, Anatolia, and the Balkans with sustainable models of governance during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The book examines their correspondence alongside the more formalized petitions they authored to advance and defend their interests within the Russian Archipelagic Principality. It describes the new political vocabulary these middling social actors developed, one rooted in biological metaphors and metaphors of friendship, and traces the channels through which it was transmitted to prominent intellectuals in Alexandria, Bucharest, Florence, Istanbul, Leipzig, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Venice, and elsewhere, documenting its resonances in seminal works of political theory. Chronologically, it focuses intently upon the period of active Russian presence in the eastern Mediterranean from 1769-1774, but follows the echoes of these exchanges in various centers of the Enlightenment over the decade and a half that followed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774). Its interest lies in exploring the articulation, exchange, and circulation of concepts within Paros and across the vast communicative space that united this dispersed maritime city with the aforementioned intellectual centers. In doing so, it aims to re-imagine Mediterranean intellectual history in the 1770s and 1780s.

The book reconstructs an intellectual universe comprised of the trans-imperial subjects who traversed this volatile space in the first half of the 1770s and the prominent commentators who adapted, reformulated, and/or reproduced their ideas. Rather than pursuing Voltaire in the writings of Voulgaris, and describing the diffusion of ideas from a European core into a Balkan periphery, The Russian Mediterranean presents Paros as a site of dynamic interactions, interconnections, and entanglements, a vibrant location of cultural convergences and divergences, and a “community of thought” that united diverse peoples who traversed multiple milieus and navigated expansive channels of information exchange. Most importantly, it presents the dispersed maritime city as a site of intellectual production worthy of study, and showcases the contributions of its varied inhabitants and visitors to the development of political theory. The study aims to recover the neglected history of the Russian Mediterranean, where concepts like “justice,” “liberty,” “freedom” and, most notably, “sovereignty” and “selfhood,” evolved in tandem with the articulation of novel legal claims. By exploring the discourse produced by the eclectic individuals who inhabited this site of myriad encounters, the book aims to restore a sense for the way ideas were generated within this transformational space, how they circulated across the Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Ionian, Tyrrhenian, and Mediterranean Seas, how decisions in Russian admiralty courts and Ottoman kadi courts permeated beyond these judicial nodes, and how developments in Paros informed intellectual debates in Paris, Pisa, St. Petersburg, and beyond.

II.  The Greek Revolution of 1770: Faith, Fatherland, and Freedom in the Age of Revolutions.

Recent scholarship on political imagination in the age of revolutions has been influenced by two key trends. First, historians influenced by the “global turn” are increasingly narrating individual movements in a manner that stresses transregional circulations and identifies connections that transcended the conventional borders of colony, empire, or region. This turn toward a conception of a “World Crisis,” in the period c. 1760-1840, has generated notable scholarship on a variety of subjects, ranging from the global history of the Declaration of Independence to the break-up of the Iberian empires. Second, various scholars have worked to restore the centrality of the imperial dimension to studies of this era thereby upending an older narrative about the transition from empires to nation-states. In so doing, they have emphasized the under-acknowledged effectiveness of empires in responding to situations of contested hegemony. Relatedly, they have also revealed how political imagination evolved within imperial institutions, as part of the process of redefining categories of subject, citizen, and state.

Yet, even as this emphasis on trans-regional circulations and imperial adaptation has opened promising new avenues of research, these trends have yet to influence some fields of historical scholarship. For instance, within modern Greek studies, the dominant narration of the age of revolutions remains a teleological account of how a “stateless nation” evolved into a “nation-state.” While this narrative emphasizes the novelty of the nation-state as a political form, it tends to ignore the political possibilities and imaginaries opened up within the Greek world from the 1770s, thereby presenting the establishment of a Greek nation-state as a historical inevitability. Moreover, in situating this history in a context of uninterrogated Ottoman “decline,” proponents of this narrative similarly overlook how crises in sovereignty within other Eurasian empires were engendering similar shifts in political imagination. In silencing alternative voices, and in neglecting to portray the Greek story as part of a global crisis of imperial sovereignty, a nuanced narrative attuned to the contingencies of macrosocial change is abandoned, in favor of a deterministic account of the establishment of the Greek nation-state.

My book project seeks to expose and challenge the methodological insularity and teleological thrust of the scholarship on Greek political imagination during the age of revolutions. In particular, this manuscript restores the Imperial Russian dimension into the story, through a detailed examination of the organization, execution, and impact of the Orlov Revolt – the failed uprising that broke out in the Balkans soon after the arrival of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean in early 1770. It outlines how covert agents of Catherine the Great embedded themselves within trans-imperial commercial, intellectual, and mercenary networks, and describes how they enticed disparate groups throughout the western half of the Ottoman Empire to rise in revolt. In so doing, this study contextualizes the variety of political claims and intellectual proposals advanced by Greeks in the 1770s and 1780s, revealing them to be cultural resonances of the moment when the Russian Empire called upon Greeks to assert a claim to political autonomy. Additionally, it elaborates a new understanding of the process that led to the creation of the Greek nation as a novel political imaginary, suggesting that the collective action of disparate and unconnected groups of rebels in 1770-1771 opened new horizons of political possibility for Greeks. In stressing the cultural significance and ramifications of the Orlov Revolt, this work emphasizes the underacknowledged significance of “collective intentionality” as a key driver of historical change.

III. Experiences of Anti-Emirati Discrimination at NYU

This project explores the diverse experiences of Emirati students across New York University’s global network. By interviewing and surveying current students, matriculating students, and New York University alumni, the aim is to better understand where our institution has succeeded in creating inclusive and equitable educational environments and where challenges remain. The project’s findings will be used to make recommendations to the Office of Inclusion and Equity to aid New York University’s efforts to advance inclusion, diversity, belonging, and access.

IV.  Other Research Initiatives: Digital Humanities Project.

Since the summer of 2018, I have been working alongside colleagues in Russia and Greece to establish a biographical database of figures involved with the conspiracy and execution of the Greek Revolution of 1770. With the help of a recent NYUAD graduate, and through the generous support of the NYUAD Undergraduate Research Program, we have begun to organize detailed records of documents from the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (Paris), the General State Archives (Athens), the Russian Naval Archives (St. Petersburg), the Russian State Historical Archives (St. Petersburg), and the National Archives (London). To date we have sketched profiles of 147 clerics and military volunteers. We have also used ArcGIS to map the movements of some of the key figures involved in the conspiracy, and to create maps that highlight the scale of an event that involved actors from Boston to Astrakhan. In the coming years, we hope to secure more funding for this project, so as to enable us to digitize and translate valuable data from the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (Istanbul).

– Vasilis Molos