My work is situated at the intersection of empire and race in the early modern Atlantic. Specifically, I study material relationships--including commerce, migration, environmental exchange, and the circulation of knowledge--that crossed legal and linguistic borders in order to understand how transimperial entanglements shaped local concepts of ethnicity, race, and caste.
My work focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and legal activities that transpired in the context of the Carolingian Empire of early medieval western Europe, their precedents in the Roman Empire, and their transformations in the Ottonian empire or the non-imperial successor states of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe.
Emily Mokros is a historian of late imperial and modern China with interests in cultural, urban, and political history. She teaches courses on Chinese, East Asian, and global history.
My research focuses on the impact of the use of soft drugs in early modern western Europe. Because chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, opium, and sugar all came from abroad, they all represented Europeans smoking, drinking, or otherwise ingesting empire – truly embodying the experience of early modern globalization, with all the anxiety and moralizing that came with it. My teaching interests also involve the Atlantic World, which of course is inextricable from early modern empires.