Cristian Capotescu

I am a postdoctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University. My scholarship reaches across the Humanities and qualitative Social Sciences and focuses, in eclectic fashion, on disasters, economic life, refugees and migration, humanitarianism and ethics, as well as social welfare and political unrest in the twentieth century. My research on "private humanitarians" in the socialist period connects multiple conceptual threads such as globalization, natural disasters, diaspora and migration, austerity economics, and transnational solidarity practices through historical as well as multi-sited ethnographic analysis.

More recently, my scholarship has also explored the social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2020-21, I served as the PI of a population health equity grant funded by the University of Washington's intercollegiate Population Health Initiative. This interdisciplinary research project studied the efficacy and challenges of distance learning for low-income students of color during COVID-19.

At Columbia, I am involved in various public-facing initiatives and research projects examining trust and mistrust of science and experts in the context of the pandemic and beyond.