and is about to start a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre for History and Economics in Paris, Sciences Po. 
Joan’s fellowship is in connection with the research programme on economic and environmental history, which is supported by the Cambridge, Harvard and Paris Centres for History and Economics. Her thesis, entitled "A Muleteers’ History of Capitalism: Mobility, Ecology, and Power in Mount Lebanon during the Long Nineteenth Century", examines capitalist transformation under ecological constraint through a collective biography of muleteers. It explores how terrain, water, forests, and animal power shaped production, technological choices, and imperial intervention in the Ottoman countryside. It argues that global capitalism expanded not simply by displacing older rural economies and energy systems, but by intensifying their exploitation. The dissertation also traces how mobility shaped social hierarchies, border-making, and class formation.