• PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2016
• MA, University of California, Berkeley, 2011
• MA, University of Toronto, 2010
• BA, University of Victoria, 2008

I am a historian of Russia and the former Soviet Union. My first book Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital is a history of skyscraper building in the Soviet capital during the Stalin era. The book was shortlisted for the 2021 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize and named one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2021. It also received Honourable Mention for the 2021 Alexander Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. The Russian translation of Moscow Monumental was published in 2022 by Corpus. In 2024, I published Making Cities Socialist, part of the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series.

Currently, I am working on two new areas of research. The first explores the history of Soviet visual statistics and data visualization during the Stalin era. The second is a material history of postwar reconstruction in the USSR that examines cities and their dependence on natural resource extraction. This project traces material networks linking Soviet cities to forests, quarries, and factories supplying the wood, marble, bricks, and steel integral to rebuilding after 1945.

Making Cities Socialist (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

“Between Competition and Collaboration: Soviet-American Efforts to Build Moscow’s Palace of Soviets,” in Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945, edited by Jean-Louis Cohen, Christina Crawford, and Claire Zimmerman (MIT Press, 2023)

Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 2020)

“The Fall of the Zariad’e: Monumentalism and Displacement in Late Stalinist Moscow,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21:1 (2020)

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2022

James H. Billington Fellowship at the Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, D.C., 2021-22

Michael I. Gurevich Prize in Russian History, University of California, Berkeley, 2011

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, 2010-14