My interests and background
I am a historian of modern Russia and Eastern Europe with broad, comparative interests in borderlands, multiethnic empires, nationalism, and internationalism. My latest work reconstructs how the imperial Russian and Soviet spaces became entangled in the global circulation of ideas of geopolitical order, composite statehood, and socioeconomic development during the long nineteenth century as well as in the interwar period. Earlier in my studies, I traced the emergence of competing visions of spheres of civilizational and economic hegemony among Polish and German nationalists between the Baltic and Black Seas on the cusp of the First World War.
I grew up in New York's Capital District and completed my undergraduate studies at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. My senior thesis at Simon's Rock, advised by Nancy Yanoshak and Chris Coggins, examined understandings of the "Ukrainian question" among Polish geopolitical thinkers between the 1890s and the Peace of Riga in 1921. In 2021, I finished my doctoral work at Harvard University, where I defended a dissertation entitled "The Clash of Internationalisms: Prometheism, National Communism, and the Fate of the Soviet Borderlands, 1889-1939." My dissertation was advised by Serhii Plokhii, Terry Martin, David Armitage, Alison Frank Johnson, and Francine Hirsch.
I am eager and available to correspond with fellow scholars, prospective graduate students, and anybody else who might share my research interests, however loosely defined. Additionally, please use the form on this website or email me directly for a current version of my CV.