Research

My research is clustered around three themes:

Cultural production and consumption under late socialism (ca. 1955-1978) in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. My dissertation “Through Thick and Thin: The Social Life of Journals under Late Socialism” explores the mechanisms of culture through the lens of literary magazines. How did periodicals function as literary texts, material objects, and social institutions? How did they shape the culture and literature of late socialism and how did they facilitate its existence beyond the Soviet Union?

Gender and sexuality in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and after. My article “‘As if the Naked One in Your Movie Were Me:’ the ‘Pornonovation’ Scandals of the Perestroika Era” looks at the scandalous reception of representations of sexual desire on the Soviet screen. In recent conference presentations and lectures, I have focused on the intersection between queerness and migration in post-socialist Central Europe.

Digital approaches to the study of culture. In earlier research on emigre periodicals as well as in my current dh project Soviet Journals Reconnected (sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton), I am developing models for a new methodology to study culture through its data. I am especially interested in the intersection of digital humanities and Slavic studies and am one of the founding members of the Digital Humanities Group within the American Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

The poster below is part of a presentation of preliminary research findings from my current dh project at the Princeton Research Day in May 2017.

cdh_poster-pdf-copy