Columbia University

Post-Doc, Harriman Institute

About

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, where I am working on a book on transnational socialist exchange during the Cold War. It is based on my doctoral dissertation in modern European and Eurasian history, which I defended at Princeton University in September 2011 under a committee composed of Stephen Kotkin, Jan T. Gross, M. Christine Boyer, and Mark Mazower (Columbia University). (An abstract and brief overview can be found under “Papers.”) One chapter of this study received the 2011 Webb-Smith prize at the 46th Annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series on “Transnational Perspectives on the Soviet Bloc, 1944-1991.”

My book project is based on extensive fieldwork and research in over fifteen archives in Berlin, London, Moscow, Rome, Tirana, and Washington D.C., including a wide array of recently declassified communist party, government, and diplomatic sources. It investigates socialist transnational exchange throughout the Eastern bloc (or so-called Second World) through the lens of Albania under Italian, Yugoslav, Soviet, and Chinese patronage. I conceive of the Eastern bloc as a system of exchanges in people, practices, and technologies and argue that this form of Soviet-sponsored exchange amounted to a kind of socialist globalization. One of the first archive-based studies of communist Albania in any language, this book engages with and contributes to the literature on Cold War-era East-West interactions, theories and studies of development and modernization, and the history of globalization and state-directed planning. To standard narratives of European integration, it also offers a fresh perspective on an alternative Soviet-driven cross-regional harmonization effort.

My other works are similarly based on multi-language and multi-archival research: An article in the Fall 2011 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies (available here: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/JCWS_a_00169) focuses on the effects of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign from the angle of the communist periphery. Another article, forthcoming in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History in Summer 2012, analyzes Soviet-European transnational exchanges in technological systems and urban planning methods, made famously visible in the proliferation of reinforced concrete and standardized cityscapes from Siberia to Southeastern Europe.

I am also currently working on other articles and book chapters on China's involvement in the developing world, comparative post-communist memory regimes, and European planners in the Second and Third World. A separate book-length research project, based, in part, on research carried out in Rome in 2009, involves the comprehensive archive-based study of Italian colonialism in the Balkans and Africa roughly between 1900 and 1950. I am particularly interested in the circulation of ideas, planning models, and practices between Italy, the Western Balkans, Libya, and East Africa, and the overlap of these flows with a new international order after the Second World War. 

Over the years, I have presented my work in a wide range of venues in over six countries and have held Mellon and Whiting fellowships at The George Washington University and at Princeton.

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