Bio
I am an historian of modern East Central Europe, particularly interested in questions of everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the body. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining Wake Forest, I was Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and Academic Advisor at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. I teach courses in modern European history, East Central Europe, nationalism and imperialism, and gender and sexuality.
I am currently working on a book manuscript investigating the growth of beauty culture in Czechoslovakia between the end of WWII and the collapse of communism in 1989. Socialist societies of Eastern Europe have been portrayed as ambivalent about, if not outright hostile to, beauty and beautification practices, which they considered a tool of women’s oppression and distraction from the more pressing tasks of building a new society. My book tells a different story. It shows that the promotion of beauty was always part of the Czechoslovak socialist project. Beauty shifted meanings across the postwar decades. Defined through hygiene and cleanliness in the early years of the socialist era, it was increasingly associated with consumer practices and leisure activities, and eventually defined as part of socialist lifestyle.
“‘Our Queen Elisabeth’: Women, Beauty, and the Body during the Czechoslovak Prague Spring,” in The Watchful Society: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body in Eastern European Socialism, ed. by Christiane Brenner and Martin Schulze Wessel (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2025).
“[The ‘Fat’ Body in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia: Compulsory Ability and Gender in Expert Discourse,]” Gender and Research 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 15-28. In Czech.