Welcome to my website! I recently completed my PhD in American Studies at Harvard University, where I was also a graduate associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Next year, I will be a Post-doctoral Lecturer at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago.
My current research examines the relationship between literature and human rights by mapping the circulation of texts and discourses between the US and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. More generally, my interests encompass twentieth-century American literature and culture, Cold War studies, and transnational American studies.
My dissertation, entitled "Cold War Bohemia: Literary Exchange between the United States and Czechoslovakia, 1947-1989," presents a narrative history of literary and cultural exchange across the so-called Iron Curtain during the Cold War. I reconstruct the journeys of literary intellectuals such as F. O. Matthiessen, Allen Ginsberg, Josef Škvorecký, and Philip Roth between the United States and the Eastern bloc in order to show how transnational encounters helped circulate new discourses about literature, cultural politics, and human rights at key moments of the Cold War. My article on the American novelist Philip Roth’s extended engagement with Czech literature and politics recently appeared in American Literary History. In addition, I have served as a volunteer for Academics Without Borders in Monrovia, Liberia, and I currently serve as a managing editor at the Journal of Transnational American Studies.