I am a historian of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with a research focus on lived experience, listening cultures, and ideology. My research broadly considers the intersections between sound, technology, and geopolitics in the twentieth century. I am particularly motivated by a desire to move beyond a logocentric approach to history to instead think through the ways sound mediated the experience between the individual and the state under socialism.
My first monograph, Socialist Noise: Sound and Soviet Identity after Stalin (in progress), explores the ways that the Soviet government strategically deployed sound and music within broader discourses of socialist modernity during the Cold War. Officials, I argue, believed sound was foundational in promoting socialism in two ways: first, it was an ideal medium through which to reinvigorate the utopian underpinnings of Marxist-Leninism after Stalin; and second, it was instrumental in distinguishing Soviet socialism from Western capitalism. Through archival research, music analysis, historical sound studies, and interviews, Socialist Noise presents a model for rethinking affect, aesthetic modernism, and lived experience during late socialism. This project has been supported by the American Musicological Society, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the American Council of Learned Societies among others.
My next monograph, Sounds for the End of the World: Cold War Epistemologies and the Sonic Imaginary, explores the relationship between acoustics, technology, ecology, and knowledge production in both the United States and Soviet Union to ask what happens when a empiricism rooted in sight, as most scientific enterprises were in the twentieth century, fails and researchers must instead rely on aural experience to shape their epistemological frameworks. In this project, I explore underwater acoustics and submarine technologies, psychoacoustics and clandestine listening practices, the sounds of space exploration, and nuclear testing acoustics to uncover the ways that militarized sound technologies reconfigured geopolitical relations in the twentieth century.
My writing has appeared in the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and the Slavic Review. I also enjoy writing for and sharing my research with broader audiences: I have bylines in Slate, The Washington Post, and The New York Times and have appeared as a guest to discuss Soviet history, culture, and politics on NBC’s Nightly News, the BBC’s World Service Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I am currently Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I’m also affiliate faculty with the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia as well as the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment. Previously, I taught at the University of Miami after completing my PhD in Historical Musicology at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. In my free time, I enjoy hiking with my dog, Laika, watching professional soccer, and making loud (and sometimes soft) noises on drums.