I study masculinity, coal mining, and the energy regime of state socialism.

I am a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.

I am an environmental historian of modern East Central Europe, with a particular focus on energy, gender, and labor. My book project, Cheap Energy Socialism: Coal, Masculinity, and the Fragile Fossil Foundation of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Dream, 1948-2004, shows how Communist leaders and ordinary citizens built a society in which energy came to be considered a right. I argue that between 1948 and 1989, the state’s legitimacy increasingly hinged on its ability to provide cheap and reliable home heating and electricity for its citizens, which in turn depended on the labor of coal miners. The coal industry, desperate to squeeze more fuel out of the earth and more work out of its employees, relied upon and cultivated qualities coded as distinctly masculine in workers to support maximum fossil fuel extraction.

I also have research interests in the history of household appliances, socialist women’s organizations, and energy infrastructure in the former Eastern Bloc. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2025. Before becoming a historian, I worked as a fact checker for The Nation and New York Magazine.