Working Title:
“Repression Remembered: How Violence Shapes Political Behavior Across Generations”

My dissertation studies the long-term effects of exposure to political violence on protest and voting behavior, with a specific focus on Soviet repressions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. I ask two main questions: First, how do people learn about state-sponsored violence that occurred in their families and communities? Second, how does knowledge of past repression affect political behavior generations later?

I explore these questions by studying how Stalinist mass repressions shape contemporary political behavior in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. My project focuses on three former Soviet countries that share a history of violence but differ considerably in their current political institutions: Moldova, Estonia, and Kazakhstan. I rely on evidence from original, cross-national surveys and semi-structured interviews to unpack the ways that the legacies of historical violence continue to shape political behavior across the region.

Publicity: Comrat State University; town of Ceadir-Lunga; Avdarma History Museum; interview in Veridica.md; lecture at Institute of Philosophy, Political Science, and Religious Studies.

Visiting Scholar: Johan Skytte Institute, University of Tartu (Estonia) from August–October 2025 and Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan) from October–December 2025.

Funding Sources: Bobst Center for Peace & Justice (Princeton); Niehaus Center for Global Governance (Princeton); Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies; P.E.O. International; Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.

I am also a founding member and co-researcher on the Russia Watcher project, which is dedicated to studying Russian public opinion in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Alongside colleagues from Princeton – Grigo Pop-Eleches (PI), Laura Howells, and Jacob Tucker – I have been running daily online surveys in Russia since mid-May 2022.

Social Media: X (formerly Twitter); Bluesky.

Publicity: Foreign Policy Research Institute; The New York Times; The Moscow Times; The Hill and elsewhere.

Funding Sources: National Science Foundation; Bobst Center for Peace and Justice (Princeton); Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (Princeton); Data-Driven Social Science Initiative (Princeton); School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton) and others.

• Political Attitudes Among Russian Migrants Post-February 2022
  • Russians in the South Caucasus: Political Attitudes and the War in Ukraine, ZOiS Report 2/2023. With Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka.
• Politics of Foreign Aid to Victims of the Chernobyl Disaster
  • “Children of Chernobyl and the Uneven Aid Crusade,” Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University website. July 13, 2021.
  • “Remembering the Children of Chernobyl: How HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Series Revived the Cuba-Chernobyl Connection,” All the Russias, NYU Jordan Center, March 18, 2020.
  • “Explaining Divergent Foreign Aid Flows to Belarusian and Ukrainian Children After the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, 1986–2011,” MPhil Dissertation, University of Cambridge, June 2021.
  • “Atoms for Autonomy: Explaining the Cuban Reaction to the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident,” Cuba in Transition: Volume 30 – Papers and Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.
• Soviet-Cuban Relations
  • “Expectations Versus Reality: Cuban Students’ Encounters with Late Soviet Socialism,” Cahiers du monde russe 64/3-4. 2022.
  • “From the ‘Island of Freedom’ to the Iron Curtain: Rethinking the role of soft power in Soviet-Cuban educational exchange programs,” BA/ MA thesis, Harvard University, March 2020.
  • “My Summer Research in Moscow and Havana,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, October 2019.
  • “My Weekend with Michael: Or, How I Survived a Hurricane on the Isla de la Juventud,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, January 29, 2019.