I'm a writer, translator, and historian by training, in my day job as Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Currently, I'm the founder and daily operator of The February 24th Archive, a civic project covering Russia's escalated war against Ukraine. From my lifelong love/fear of and research on maps, I build digital infrastructure among journalists, academic specialists, intelligence communities and policymakers. The goal is to foster open source, fast-paced, geographically specific, intense public engagement. In addition, I'm a host of 85+ episodes of podcasts on the New Books Network, which has 120+ channels and now reaches 5M downloads monthly. You can click on my books below and find me at academia.edu and on Researchgate 

My Books 

My Open Access Projects

I contribute to Chicago's history of cartography series and I've translated 300+ entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's ongoing Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. I'm also a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer program and I'm on the founding board of H-Ukraine, which promotes scholarly discussion on H-Net across the humanities and social sciences.
ALL EPISODES

88. Adam Blackler (U Wyoming), An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa (Penn State UP, 2022), September 22, 2022

87. Catherine Gibson, Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russia Imperial Baltic (Oxford UP, 2022), June 17, 2022

86. Piotr Puchalski (Pedagogical U, Krakow), Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939 (Routledge, 2022), April 5, 2022

85. Valerie A. Kivelson (U Michigan-Ann Arbor) and Christine Worobec (Northern Illinois U), eds., Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000-1900: A Sourcebook (NIU Series / Cornell UP, 2020), March 29, 2022

84. Samuel Clowes Huneke (George Mason U), States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (U Toronto Press, 2022), February 25, 2022

83. Paweł Markiewicz (Polish Institute of International Affairs, Warsaw), Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II (Purdue UP, 2021), Feb. 1, 2022

82. Jason Lustig (U Texas at Austin), A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford UP, 2021), Jan. 24, 2022

81. Lucie Fremlova, Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021), Dec. 24, 2021

80. Brigid O'Keeffe (Brooklyn College), Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomsbury, 2021),
Dec. 16, 2021

79. Molly T. Blasing (U Kentucky), Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021), Nov. 23, 2021

78. José Vergara (Bryn Mawr College), All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature (Cornell UP, 2021),
Oct. 20, 2021

77. John-Paul Himka (U of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada), Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry (Ibidem/ Columbia UP, Ukrainian Voices New Series, 2021),
Oct. 12, 2021

76. Olesya Khromeychuk (University College London), A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister (Ibidem / Columbia UP - Ukrainian Voices New Series, 2021), Oct. 6, 2021

75. Patrice M. Dabrowski, The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2021), Oct. 1, 2021

74. Vladislav Davidzon, From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Academica Press, 2021), Sept. 27, 2021

73. Mark Baker, Čas proměn / Time of Changes (Albatros Media, 2021), September 24, 2021

72. Sarah J. Young (University College London), Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel'burg Prison (UCL Press, 2021, open access), September 20, 2021

71. Eliza Ablovatski (Kenyon College), Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe: The Deluge of 1919 (Cambridge UP, 2021), August 11, 2021

70. Alison K. Smith (U Toronto), Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia (University of Chicago Press, 2021),
July 27, 2021

69. Marta Dyczok (Western U, Ontario, Canada), Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidoscope from Hromadske Radio, 2016-2019 (Ibidem Press, 2021), July 9, 2021

68. Kristin Poling (U Michigan-Dearborn), Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020),
July 8, 2021

67. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (Birkbeck College, University of London), Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies, 2021), July 6, 2021

66. Lisa Bordetsky-Williams (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Forget Russia: A Novel (Tailwinds Press, 2021), July 2, 2021

65. Stephen V. Bittner (Sonoma State U), Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar (Oxford University Press, 2021), July 1, 2021

64. Chad Bryant (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Prague: Belonging in the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021), June 23, 2021

63. Theodora Dragostinova (Ohio State U), The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene (Cornell University Press, 2021), June 18, 2021

62. Kristy Ironside (McGill U), A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2021), June 2, 2021

61. Natalia Aleksiun (Touro College), Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021), May 31, 2021

60. Katarzyna Person (Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw), Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (Cornell University Press, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021),
May 28, 2021

59. Dina Fainberg (City University of London), Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021),
May 25, 2021

58. Faith C. Hillis (U Chicago), Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s (Oxford University Press, 2021), May 18, 2021

57. Alta Ifland, The Wife Who Wasn't: A Novel (New Europe Books, 2021), May 14, 2021

56. Brian Castner, Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike (Doubleday, 2021), May 12, 2021

55. Tetyana Lokot (Dublin City University), Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), May 10, 2021

54. Amelia Glaser (University of California, San Diego), Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Palestine to Scottsboro (Harvard University Press, 2020), May 5, 2021

53. Svenja Bethke (University of Leicester, UK), Dance on the Razor's Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos (U of Toronto Press, 2020), April 30, 2021

52. Stella Ghervas (Newcastle U, UK), Conquering Peace: From Enlightenment to the European Union) (Harvard UP, 2021),
April 28, 2021

51. Siobhán Hearne (Durham U, UK), Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Clases in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021), April 7, 2021

50. Victoria R. Shmidt (Uni-Graz, Austria) and Bernadette N. Jaworsky (Brno U, Czech Republic), Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (Routledge, 2020), March 31, 2021

49. Elisabeth Piller (Uni-Freiburg, Germany), Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933 (Franz Steiner Verlag / German Historical Institute, 2021), March 24, 2021

48. Krista Goff (Miami U), Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the South Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2021), March 24, 2021

47. R. Chris Davis (Lone Star College-Kingwood), Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920-1945 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019),
March 22, 2021

46. Jeremy Best (Iowa State U), Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021), March 19, 2021

45. Alexander Maxwell (Victoria U, Wellington, New Zealand), Everyday Nationalism in Hungary, 1789-1867 (DeGruyter, 2019), March 17, 2021

44. Trevor Erlacher (U Pittsburgh), Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes: An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Donstov (Harvard University Press / Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021), March 15, 2021

43. Pey-Yi Chu (Pomona College), The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press, 2021), March 9, 2021

42. Fabrizio Fenghi (Brown U), It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), February 10, 2021

41. Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia U/ Library of Congress), The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Michigan State University Press, 2020), February 9, 2021

40. Tiffany Florvil (U New Mexico), Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2020), February 3, 2021

39. Kathryn Ciancia (U Wisconsin-Madison), On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford University Press, 2020), January 22, 2021

38. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio (U Florida), Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire (Ohio University Press, 2020). January 21, 2021

37. Felix B. Chang and Sunnie T. Rucker-Chang (U Cincinnati), Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2020), January 18, 2021

36. Leslie Waters (U Texas, El Paso), Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester Press/ Boydell & Brewer, 2020),
December 31, 2020

35. Anna Hájková (Warwick U, UK), The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford University Press, 2020), December 30, 2020

34. Monica Black (U Tennessee-Knoxville), A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2020), December 29, 2020

33. Adam Fabry (Chilecito U, Argentina), The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2020), December 28, 2020

32. David Henig (Utrecht U, Netherlands), Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Illinois Press, 2020), December 18, 2020

31. Jiří Hutecka (Olomouc U, Czech Republic), Men under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War (Berghahn Books, 2020), December 9, 2020

30. Dominique Kirchner Reill (Miami U/ European University Institute-Fiesole), The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard University Press, 2020),
December 2, 2020

29. Andrea Pető (Central European University-Vienna), The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2020), November 27, 2020

28. Cristina Bejan (Metropolitan State U, Denver), Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania (Palgrave, 2020), November 23, 2020

27. Thomas Fleischman (U of Rochester), Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020), November 3, 2020

26. Andrew Demshuk (American U), Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2020), October 26, 2020

25. Alexey Golubev (U Houston), The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020),
October 20, 2020

24. Jessica Zychowicz (U Alberta, Canada), Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2020), October 16, 2020

23. Brandon M. Schechter (NYU-Shanghai), The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects (Cornell University Press, 2019), October 6, 2020

22. Jennifer J. Carroll (Elon University), Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2019),
October 6, 2020

21. David R. Marples (U Alberta, Canada), Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir (E-International Relations, 2020),
October 2, 2020

20. Anita Kurimay (Bryn Mawr College), Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), September 15, 2020

19. Stephen Riegg (Texas A&M-College Station), Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1800-1914 (Cornell University Press, 2020), August 28, 2020

18. David Moon (U York, UK and Nazarbayev U, Kazakhstan), The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), August 21, 2020

17. Natan M. Meir (Portland State U), Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford University Press, 2020), August 19, 2020

16. Madina Tlostanova (Linköping U, Sweden), What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), August 14, 2020

15. Diana T. Kudaibergenova (U Cambridge, UK), Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020),
July 21, 2020

14. Karl Qualls (Dickinson U), Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951 (University of Toronto Press, 2020), April 17, 2020

13. Maya K. Peterson (UC Santa Cruz), Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge University Press, 2019), April 16, 2020

12. Jessie Labov (McDaniel College-Budapest), Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Defining Culture beyond the Nation (Central European University Press, 2019),
March 20, 2020

11. Nancy Sinkoff (Rutgers U), From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020), March 17, 2020

10. Larry Wolff (NYU), Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Stanford University Press, 2020), March 6, 2020

9. Aliide Naylor (UC London), Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (I.B. Tauris, 2020), February 27, 2020

8. Penny Sinanoglou (Wake Forest U), Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019), February 3, 2020

7. Jelena Subotić (Georgia State U), Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019), December 12, 2019

6. Chet Van Duzer (Brown U), Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta Marina of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), December 6, 2019

5. Emanuela Grama (Carnegie Mellon U), Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania (Indiana University Press, 2019), December 2, 2019

4. Lewis Siegelbaum (Michigan State U), Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian History (Northern Illinois/Cornell University Press, 2019), November 6, 2019

3. Mark Monmonier (Syracuse U), Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), September 27, 2019

2. Bathsheba Demuth (Brown U), Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019),
September 10, 2019

1. Matthew Edney (U Southern Maine), Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019), June 25, 2019