About
Fields of Study
- 20th cent. American History
- Science, Technology, and Society
- Outer Space ✨🚀👨🚀🌒✨
I'm a historian of 20th century American science and technology. I see myself primarily as a social historian of the future, but am broadly interested in the intersecting histories of political economy, technoscience, labor, and ideology.
In my dissertation I study the history of space exploration and its social ramifications in the United States. In particular, I am interested in how in the "Space Age" the American and Soviet space programs conceived of the future and understood their relationship with it in ways big and small, from rockets to futuristic kitchens, and how in turn that future reshaped American and Soviet relationships to labor, technology, and politics.
I am honored to be an AHA-NASA Fellow in Aerospace History which will allow me to be based partly in Chicago and partly in Washington, DC at the Kluge Center. and a recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Scholar Award in Honor of Robert M. Teeter and the Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History. This past summer I was a fellow at Middlebury's Monterey Symposium in Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey and before that I was a Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellow with the National Humanities Alliance where I helped advocate for the humanities in higher education. Previously I was also a Visegrad Fellow at the Open Society Archivum in Budapest, which set me on the track of being a historian of space and the Cold War.
I also work alongside Professors Howard Brick, Paul Le Blanc, and Brian Whitener on a (massive!) historical document collection callled Independent Marxism in the American Century, four volumes of which are forthcoming with Haymarket Books and Brill.
Before Michigan, I lived in Budapest, Hungary where I received an MA in Comparative History and Jewish Studies from Central European University (now forcibly relocated to Vienna). At CEU I completed a thesis entitled "Toward the Jewish Revolution: Yiddish Anarchists in New York City, 1901-1906," which traced how Yiddish radicals at the turn of the century went from rejecting ethnic Jewish politics to embracing between the assissination of President William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 to the wave of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian empire around the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. It won the Peter Hanak Prize for Best Thesis and part of it was republished in With Freedom in My Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism, eds. Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer (University of Illinois Press, 2023). That project was supported by CEU and by the Ruth B. Fein Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society.
In my sparetime I enjoy fried chicken and dive bars that struggle to pass health inspections.
If you are an incoming or perspective graduate student, please feel free to reach out to me to talk about the university, Ann Arbor, the STS program, the graduate student union (GEO 3550), or local chicken joints and dive bars.
