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Biography
I am a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Over the course of my career, I have become increasingly interested in the USSR's involvement in transnational movements and processes, whether political, social, cultural, or economic. I have also pursued research interests in the history of Communism and world history. In addition to the books mentioned below, I've published articles on a number of topics in Soviet social and political history.
My first book, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), examined the Bolshevik project of cultural transformation through a case study of peasants' responses to the Soviet anti-religious campaign. In 1999, the book was awarded Honorable Mention for the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Prize from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
In 2011, I published The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century: A Global History through Sources (Oxford University Press. Through a collection of carefully selected documents, some presented for the first time in English translation, the book seeks to provide an inside look at how people around the world subjectively experienced, and contributed to, global communism.
My current book project is entitled Displaced: From the Soviet Union to Franco’s Spain in the Cold War. The general questions that frame the project are the following: what were the global consequences of the transnational lives set in motion by the defeat of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)? How do civil wars, and the refugee movements they propel, transform domestic polities, international systems, and transnational institutions? To address these issues, I examine the "refugee worlds" of the nearly 5000 child refugees, political exiles, and other Spaniards who fled to the USSR during or shortly after the Spanish Civil War. By "refugee worlds," I mean the political, social, economic and cultural conjunctures that they imported in displacement, the unfamiliar societies in which they found themselves, and the new structures they helped to create.