Biography

I am a historian of modern Eastern Europe. My research focuses on the socialist and post-socialist periods, spanning interdisciplinary domains such as the transnational history of childhood and youth, memory studies and oral history, travel and consumption, gender history, and comparative nationalism. My current book project, ‘Ceaușescu’s Children: The Making and Unmaking of Romania’s Last Socialist Generation (1965-2010), explores the remembered experiences, institutional structures and ideological constructions of socialist childhood and citizenship in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Juxtaposing official representations of socialist childhood and nationhood against personal recollections, the book investigates the role of children as both objects of state efforts to raise loyal socialist citizens and as agents in their own right. The larger theoretical stakes are to reconsider dominant narratives on state socialism, moving beyond bipolar representations of the relation between state and society as well as between subjectivity and ideology.

My research has found expression in articles on socialist childhood and citizenship in late socialism, post-socialist memory regimes, gendered representations of national and European identity, post-communist film, national identity and travel writing, and the teaching of regional history in post-socialist Eastern Europe.

My most recent research project explores international youth exchanges during the late Cold War, aiming to contribute to the literature on transnational flows of people, ideas, and ideologies in the contemporary world. Starting inquiry from the boom in international youth exchanges in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, the book will examine how youth exchanges expanded beyond the Soviet Bloc to include collaborations with Western European and so-called “Third World” countries in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. This project joins a growing literature on the deployment of “soft power” during the Cold War, positioning itself at the intersection of research on socialist youth and works on travel and tourism.

I teach a variety of classes at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies:

Life Writing: Memory and Identity in Twentieth Century Europe (BA)

The Balkans from Empires to Nation-States (BA)

The Crisis of 1989 and the New Global Revolutions

Frontiers of History (BA)

All Quiet on the Eastern Front: Culture, Politics and Everyday Life in Central & Eastern Europe from Stalin to Present