I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. I completed my doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 2013. I specialize in the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union with a focus on press photography, film, print and visual culture, consumerism, and historical memory.

I am at present completing my monograph, The Performance of Modern Life: Press Photography and Public Identity in Russia, 1900-1924. It examines how photographers and magazine editors transcribed the everyday experience of modernity into a new type of visual storytelling. I argue that the imperial and Soviet illustrated press offered readers new models of identity and citizenship, which alternately challenged and reinforced the status quo. By examining identity through photo-reportage, my work reveals the imperial antecedents of Soviet propaganda and contributes to broad historical debates about self-fashioning, mass media, and state power. Throughout the project, I also explore the tension between the authority ascribed to photography as historical evidence and the various discourses that informed the practice of photo-reportage.

Parts of this research have appeared as an article in Kritika, a leading journal in Russian and Eurasian studies, and as another essay in a landmark edited collection. I have also been asked to contribute a second article to the Russian Review, which is currently in draft. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, and the Frederick Jackson Turner Fund have all supported my research.