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

My dissertation book project traces how knowledge of political violence is passed down across generations and how the resulting memories affect political participation among victims’ descendants, long after the regime responsible has fallen.

Even when repression succeeds in demobilizing its targets in the short term, families remember what they endured and pass stories down to their children. These inherited memories go on to shape political attitudes and behavior in ways that vary across both successor states and modes of participation, patterns that existing research has largely overlooked. I argue that the long-term effects of repression depend chiefly on who ends up in charge after the repressive regime falls: where the opposition takes power and holds perpetrators accountable, descendants can pursue their grievances through the ballot box; where the old guard retains influence and justice remains out of reach, unresolved resentment fuels protest and contentious politics for generations to come.

I substantiate this argument with original, multi-method fieldwork in Estonia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan—three countries that share a history of Soviet rule and repression but vary in the degree of elite continuity after the transition from communist rule. Over a year of fieldwork, I conducted roughly 100 interviews with repression victims and their descendants, and fielded original surveys in all three countries and several neighboring ones. Unlike the single-case studies that dominate the literature, my comparative approach identifies elite continuity with the repressive past as a key source of variation in how the legacies of mass violence manifest in present-day politics. Justice, my research suggests, requires neutralizing not just the repressive regime but the cadres who ran it: regime change alone is not enough, since old-regime representatives can retain influence and act as spoilers against efforts to reckon with the past.

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 — Grigore 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.

Before and during the early stages of my PhD, my research spanned three areas: Russian migration politics, the politics of disaster aid, and Soviet–Cuban relations. Selected publications and writing from each are below.

• 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.
• The 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, Harvard University. 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, Vol. 30, 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.