PhD Candidate
Africa & Late Modern Europe
I am a historian of Africa and the Soviet Union/Russia, with particular interests in global socialism and capitalism; comparative empire and decolonization; race, nationalism, and ethnicity; Cold War ideology and interventions; area studies; and the international circulation of people, ideas, and arms.
My dissertation traces the entangled political and intellectual histories of South Africa and the Soviet Union from the years of apartheid and socialism, through parallel legitimacy crises and the implosion of the old regimes, and finally to the construction of a new order in each country in the 1990s. Central to my research is a decades-long transnational conversation about what Marxists called the 'national question': Does liberation mean living together or apart? Does decolonization mean emphasizing what people have in common or what makes people different?
With Nancy Jacobs, I am also working on a short book about the peace deal that brought the Inkatha Freedom Party into South Africa's first all-inclusive elections in 1994.
Awards, Fellowships & Scholarships
2019 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship
2018 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Dissertation Research Grant
2018 Reinhard Bendix Memorial Fellowship, UC Berkeley
2018 John L. Simpson Fellowship in International and Comparative Studies, UC Berkeley
2018 Center for African Studies Rocca Fellowship, UC Berkeley
2017 UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award
2016 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, Russian
2013-14 History, Classics, and Archaeology Masters Scholarship, University of Edinburgh
2013-14 Sheila Cannell Postgraduate Scholarship, University of Edinburgh
2013 Marjorie Harris Weiss Award, Brown University
2013 Anne Crosby Emery Fellowship, Brown University
