I am an interdisciplinary cultural historian interested in material realities behind some of the most entrenched and deceptively immaterial metaphors.

My first book, The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers what it takes to make an uneventful border look and feel more urgent and proximate for remote populaces. In many ways, it is the story of our times, a fixture in political discourses of more than one country. At the same time, it is a very local story that unfolded at one of the most iconic borders in history, the Iron Curtain. I zero in on its course between the then-Czechoslovakia and West Germany to trace how civilians, in particular ethnic German refugees from the former Sudetenland, dramatized the militarized landscape with all creative means at their disposal: new religious cults of Jesus and Mary figures allegedly tossed into the West by the Communists, replicas of architectural landmarks stranded in no-man's-land or razed on the militarized zone's eastern side, travelogues and poems about visits at the border, photographs of "the gaze" into the Eastern bloc. Over time, these efforts produced a physical entity of their own, the so-called "prayer wall". The book received Honorable Mention for the Modern Languages Association's biannual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures for 2014-15. A Chinese translation appeared with the Shandong Pictorial Publishing House in 2018.

Together with Irene Kacandes, I co-edited the volume Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn Books, 2017), which pushes against the perception that for this part of the world, geography has been destiny. The topic of Eastern Europe beyond its geographical borders runs through my research on the Cold War broadcaster Radio Free Europe. Drawing on the station's corporate archive at the Hoover Institution and documents in German archives, I have published a number of articles about its hitherto unfamiliar environmental and televisual history.

With Michelle Moyd and David Gramling, I co-wrote a programmatic book Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave Pivot, 2018). It is an appeal to think more deeply and collaboratively about the political aspects of language use and see them as steeped in multilingualism. The gist appears here and here.

My forthcoming book, On the Wire over the Abyss: The Art and Politics of the Tightrope in Germany, 1918-1952 (Cabinet Books, 2025), re-embodies and re-politicizes a seemingly neutral crisis metaphor. It bridges philosophy, visual arts, literature, circus history, history of flight technologies, and disaster studies to formulate a critique of the "funambulic imagination", or the century-old impulse to use the abstract tightrope walker figure to relate to catastrophe and to measure empathy-by-proxy. By way of a counterpoint, the book plots a political biography of the once-famous Camilla Mayer Troupe and recounts its dramatic and not always empathy-worthy rise, death, and resurrection in Germany during World War I, the Nazi era, and the early Cold War years. As Germany's ever-fickle mirror, the popular troupe connected obsessions with Alpinism with the perils of postwar rubble mountains, the discovery of stratospheric flight with the rise of extreme spectacle, Nazi "sacrifice readiness" with light entertainment, and transcending figurative limits with trespassing real-life borders. The story grew out of my essay for The Cabinet Magazine; a Spanish-language translation is also forthcoming.

My next book project, Curious George: A Biography, reconstructs the life and afterlife of the fictional "monkey" Curious George—one of the world's most famous and successfully marketed literary characters—in global cultural and historical contexts. It illuminates the Northern German roots and colonial connections of the figure's co-creators, Margret and H. A. Rey, and their German-Jewish families. It follows the couple's circuitous migrations between Europe and South and North America, documenting their encounters with wild animals and identifying their creative echoes. And it recounts stories of primate extraction, capture, and upkeep in zoos, private homes, primatology labs, books for children and adults, and even anarchist pamphlets to introduce Curious George as a repository of changing cultural, zoological, and social knowledges about and relationships with animals, rather than a racist cliché or a metaphor for human experiences of uprooting and displacement, as he is currently known. Public writing related to this project has appeared in LA Review of Books and Hypocrite Reader.

I am passionate about rigorous public writing and have written on the handshake for Artforum, on monuments and the legacy of rejected book manuscripts for The Washington Post, on right-wing multilingualism and the possibility of antifascist language for Boston Review, on the challenge of architectural palimpsests for The Smithsonian Magazine, on stained glass and war for LA Review of Books, as well as on other topics for such outlets as The Guardian, Reuters, Pacific Standard, and Al Jazeera America. I happily mentor students keen on doing this kind of work and frequently assign forms of public writing in my courses.

I teach across the German Studies curriculum, including elementary language. I am also active in Comparative Literature, where I have served as chair, graduate program director, and M.A. student advisor, especially to students interested in intersections between Eastern European and Germanophone cultures. My other teaching and mentoring strengths include critical animal studies, circus cultures, biography, graphic arts and book illustration, war aftermaths, Cold War culture, politics of German environmentalism, propaganda, science fiction under socialism, nostalgia for socialism, civic language and linguistic justice, multilingualism and monolingualism, and belonging.