My sustained interest lies in the study of colonialism, imperialism and dictatorships, exploring these as systems of power structure and as lived experience.  My first book, entitled "Despite Cultures. Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan" (Pittsburgh University Press, 2016) examines Soviet colonial strategies in Central Asia and analyses how Moscow communicated and enforced rule across large distances, with a particular focus on how Soviet officials in the colonized peripheries (mis)understood the system they were building. My research interests include Soviet colonial photography, comparative analysis of "merit" under capitalism, communism and colonial systems, Russian colonialism in comparative perspective, the history of childhood and ageing, post-Stalinism, urban and food history.

I am currently working on a manuscript that investigates how older people aged after Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Another book project titled “Imperial Innocence” (under contract with the Cambridge University Press, Elements Series) is a cultural history of Soviet imperialism in co-authorship with Yevhenii Monastyrskyi (Harvard University).

I conceptualized and co-convened online exhibition “Soviet Central Asia in 100 Objects” together with professor Alexander Morrison (Oxford) and Edmund Herzig (Oxford)  at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre in 2021. I co-founded the RUTA Association, based in Ukraine.

I hold a Ph.D. in Modern History from Humboldt University in Berlin; an M.A. from Social and Cultural History from the University of Essex; and a B.A. from the American University – Central Asia with a Major in Comparative Political Science and a Minor in Sociology and Social Anthropology. I held postdoctoral positions at the Technical University Berlin and the Liverpool John Moores University. I was also a Visiting Fellow at the Harriman Institute at the Columbia University and at the Center for Advanced Studies LMU (CAS LMU) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.