About Me


I am an Assistant Professor in European History at Washington & Jefferson College. I earned my PhD in Russian and European History from the University of Chicago in 2015, and my dissertation won the ASEEES Tucker/Cohen Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in Soviet or Post-Soviet Politics and History in 2016. I have also been awarded an ACLS Project Development Grant, Mellon-Council for European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant, among other awards.

As a cultural historian, I investigate the interplay of cultural production and state authority in the Soviet Union through the lens of classical music. My current book manuscript, Creative Comrades: Censorship and Collaboration in Late-Stalinist Music, examines Soviet classical music censorship during the late-Stalinist repression of the intelligentsia. My research demonstrates the uniquely collaborative nature of authorship and censorship in Soviet music in this era, while reforming our conceptualization of censorship itself within and beyond the Soviet context. (Click here to read more about my research.)

I have presented my research at a variety of national and international conferences, and I have published articles in Jahrbücher für Geschichte OsteuropasJournal of Musicology, and Perspectives on Europe. (Click here to read my publications.) In collaboration with a group of Chicago-based scholars, I co-curated an exhibit of Soviet children’s literature at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library Special Collections Research Center and contributed to the published catalog, Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary: Children’s Books and Graphic Art. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have brought together historians, musicologists, and other scholars of culture as co-founder and past president of the Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Music Study Group. I am also a member of the public history network Women Also Know History.

Prior to my current appointment, I taught Russian and European History and Humanities at Reed College, Lewis & Clark College, Northern Arizona University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was also a Fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have advised B.A. theses in Russian history, European history, international history, Jewish history, and cultural history.