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I am a historian of modern Russia and European Jewry and Assistant Professor in the History and Russian Studies departments. My research interests include the Russian Empire’s economy in a global context, modern Jewish history, and the trajectories of social unrest and ethnic violence in the East European borderlands. 

My current book project documents the growth of the Russian Empire’s Black Sea grain trade and the simultaneous emergence of different forms of ethnic violence, including anti-Jewish violence, in fast commercializing regions of Southern Ukraine under Russian imperial rule. As part of my research, I reconstruct the everyday workings of the Russian empire’s grain trade in and around port cities, and the fraught interactions between traders and producers along commercial networks. I show how such commercial sites often erupted into rioting and ethnic attacks in an empire where ethnicity and economy tended to overlap. I explore popular and official reactions to the growth of a global commodity market in the late nineteenth century to understand new definitions of ethnicity and the political economy of the Russian empire’s final decades. 

I bring to my research and teaching a background in Comparative Literature and Yiddish Studies, and a fascination with global and comparative history. I am passionate about the mechanics of writing and historical methodology, and look forward to teaching and advising students from different majors or backgrounds who are interested in broader questions about Russian, Soviet, and Jewish history, as well as the history of ethnic violence, social and economic life under the Russian empire or Soviet socialism, and the makings of historical narratives. 

Teaching

• HIS 124 Russia as a Multiethnic Empire
• HIS 233 Soviet History and the Cold War
• HIS 333 The Jewish Diaspora
• HIS 431 Genocides in 20th Century Eurasia