About My Work
My research considers the place of Baku, Azerbaijan as a place where distinct cultural traditions (Iranian, Russian, Azerbaijani/Turkish, Armenian, Jewish, and more) meet, create a powerfully cosmopolitan regional culture, and also clash, creating a Baku diaspora that intersects with a variety of distinct ethnic diasporas worldwide. The city's politics reflect major trends of late 19th to early 21st century: the global contest for oil and energy, nation-state building and ethnic cleansing, world wars, and Cold War, the collapse of the socialist alternative, and more.
Citations
“Framing the Socialist City as Practice,” Contemporary European History (forthcoming 2022).
“Remembering Our Worth: Commemorating the Azerbaijani Nation Through Exchange,” conditional acceptance for publication in Canadian Slavonic Papers, 63, nos. 1-2 (2021): 168-186. DOI:10.1080/00085006.2021.1915523
"Baku’s Soviet Vnye: The Post-Soviet Creation of a Soviet Past," in The Future of Post-Socialism, edited by Dijana Jelaca and Daniela Lugaric (State University of New York Press, forthcoming 2018).
"Reading a Master Plan Through Text" (Online discussion forum), Second World Urbanity group, http://www.secondworldurbanity.org/category/master-plan-of-the-socialist-city/, 2015.
Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power in 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
"Dynamic Cityscapes: Contesting the Soviet City,"
Russian Analytical Digest 85 (2010): 2-4.
"Urban Studies Within Russian History: Challenges Ahead," Antropologicheskii forum 12 (2010): 53-62.
Professional Associations
Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies
American Historical Association