PhD Candidate
Africa & Late Modern Europe
I am a historian of South Africa and the Soviet Union/Russia, with particular interests in empire and decolonization; ideologies of racial and ethnic difference; global socialism and capitalism; area studies; and the international circulation of people, ideas, and arms.
My dissertation is a comparative history of how the South African and Soviet states institutionalized ethnic difference, told by centering the perspectives of South Africans and Soviets who engaged one another as they moved back and forth. Using institutional archives, personal papers, interviews, memoirs, and academic works from both South Africa and Russia, I trace activists, bureaucrats, students, scholars, and spies. Extending from the early Cold War through the simultaneous collapse of apartheid and socialism, my research exploresa decades-long transnational conversation about the political meanings of race, nation, and ethnicity. In both the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa, a major—and ultimately revolutionary—political fault line separated advocates of divergent ways of organizing human difference.
Publications
"Histories of Color: Blackness and Africanness in the Soviet Union," with Thom Loyd, forthcoming in Slavic Review (2022)
"The Politics of Imperial Gratitude," Africa is a Country, 14 March 2022. First appeared as "ANC is enthralled with idea of repaying a historical debt," Business Day, 7 March 2022.
"The Peace Deal: The Formation of the Ingonyama Trust and the IFP Decision to Join South Africa's 1994 Elections," South African Historical Journal 73:2 (2021)
"Secret details of the land deal that brought the IFP into the 94 poll," Mail & Guardian, 7 August 2019
Awards and Fellowships
2020 Center for African Studies Rocca Fellowship, UC Berkeley
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
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
