• 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 book Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital looks at 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’ Best Books of 2021. Currently, I am working on a new project about the Soviet Institute for “Pictorial Statistics”—an office created in the early 1930s that sought to render complex economic and planning ideas into images that could be readily understood by all Soviet citizens. This research places Soviet activity in an international context to show how modern states attempted to resolve challenges of mass communication and to create literate and engaged publics in the twentieth century. I am also working on a short book called Making Cities Socialist that will be published as part of the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series.

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)

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

Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2016 (declined)

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

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