Bio
I am an historian of modern East Central Europe, particularly interested in questions of gender, sexuality, the body, and everyday life. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago, and I was previously 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, gender and sexuality, and have an interest in disability history.
I am currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Embodied Socialism: Gendered Bodies and Medical Expertise in Czechoslovakia 1965-1989. The project investigates the ways in which the political and social upheaval of the 1960s, common to both East and West of the Cold War divide, transformed notions of gender, body, and subjectivity in Czechoslovakia. It shows that the fashioning of one’s body and its cultivation, criticized as a bourgeois holdover in the Stalinist 1950s, one that distracted the population from the more serious goal of building a new society and which harmed efforts at women’s emancipation, came to be promoted from above and demanded from below as part of socialist lifestyle in the 1970s and 1980s.