Welcome, and thanks for visiting. I’m professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and a current Guggenheim Fellow in Political Science. I’m also an associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University and have been honored to serve as an invited professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and, since 2022, as a trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine.
I write about contemporary and twentieth century politics and land. Most of my work focuses on people’s lives in rural communities. I’m interested in how economic change affects people and how those effects translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. I’m also interested in how different people think about their relationship with land. Throughout the past three decades, I’ve conducted participant-observation research in villages in Ukraine and Russia. In my work I try to convey what I think people in North America could learn from people in Eastern Europe.
I’m the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (NIU-Cornell University Press, 2022), which showed how systems of vote buying and political pressure on people’s access to public infrastructure and employment changed the meaning of democracy for people in Eastern Europe—and may threaten to do the same in the United States. My book The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2008) analyzed how people living in villages along the Russia-Ukraine border lost their land through privatization. It received the Harvard University Davis Center Prize in Political and Social Studies. I wrote about Ukrainian national imaginaries in the artistry of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and their lessons for global democracy in the Washington Post, Journal of Democracy and Politico. I’ve written about Zelenskyy, Trump, and Putin in the Washington Post and Politico. I’m currently writing a twentieth-century historical ethnography of a rural street in a largely Hungarian-speaking part of southwestern Ukraine under fascism, socialism, and neoliberal democracy.
I’ve been honored to receive recognition for my work from the American Political Science Association and the Hungarian Studies Association. My research has been possible thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Social Science Research Council, and the International Research and Exchanges Board, among others. My work has benefited from conversations with colleagues during fellowships at the Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Harvard Ukrainian Institute, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. I’m grateful to have been offered fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University.
I attended public school in the Boston area and went on to earn my bachelor’s degree in History and Literature from Harvard. I was trained in the social sciences at Yale, where I was a student of the late scholar and sheep farmer James C. Scott and received a PhD in Political Science.
I write and lecture in English, French, Ukrainian, and Russian and speak Hungarian. I read several other European languages.
At the New School for Social Research, I teach Eastern European politics and political economy and am the founding director (2017) of a doctoral research group, “Decolonizing Eastern European Studies.” I’m an affiliated faculty member in Historical Studies and a faculty fellow of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. I’ve been a faculty fellow with the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought. I welcome interest from prospective graduate students.
I live in New York’s Hudson Valley, where I steward forested land with my family.
