About Me
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University.
I completed my Ph.D. at Columbia University (2018) with a dissertation on literary prominence
under emergent capitalism in post-Soviet Russia. Since then, I developed that
project into a book, entitled
Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism,
which will be published in March 2025 by Cornell University Press.
Research for that book included a deep dive into 1990s bestsellers in Russia. Along with two research assistants at
Georgetown, Amelia Bejamin and Nina Armstrong, I catalogued every title to appear on Russia's central bestseller lists in the first
post-Soviet decade. You can download the dataset and view some visualizations here.
My secondary research interests have led me to investigate such disparate subjects as Soviet
postwar subcultures, disgust in science fiction, medieval festivals in contemporary Russia,
and performance as a mode of realism in the prose of Vladimir Sharov and Nikolai Gogol.
I have also co-led a multi-year research project into the transnational movements of leftist artists
and thinkers in the post-1917 era. This project is meant as a corrective to the binaristic Cold War thinking
that is at the heart the Slavic field. That project resulted in a book called
Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility and Leftist Culture after 1917, out with University of Toronto Press in September 2024.
I have been fortunate enough to teach both language and literature courses at Columbia, Barnard, Vanderbilt
and now Georgetown. I also advise undergraduate and master's theses at Georgetown and have been lucky enough
to serve on a few doctoral committees at other institutions. Outside of my strictly academic tasks, I have been
a strong advocate for academic unionization. I helped lead the graduate student union at Columbia and believe that
Georgetown faculty, especially contingent faculty, needs to unionize to demand better treatment from the university.
On this site, you can read more about my teaching experience,
find links to some of my publications,
and read some of my public-facing writing, including a blog
which I update occasionally, as inspiration strikes. If you have any questions,
or want to contact me for any reason, please do so here.