Research Interests

• Cold War History
• Russian and Soviet History
• Middle Eastern History
• History of Media and Propaganda
• The History of Childhood
• The History of Soviet Science

Courses Taught

• Imperial Russian History
• Soviet History
• Survey of Modern Western Civilizations, 1648-present
• The Cold War
• Twentieth Century European History
• The History of Soviet/East European Film
• The Historian’s Craft
• Senior Capstone Writing Seminar
• Russian Intellectual History
• The Global Cold War (graduate)
• Soviet History (graduate)

Awards and Honors

• Global Fellow, Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. (2023)
• Kenan Fellow, Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. (2017)
• Moshe Dayan Research Fellow, Tel Aviv University (2017)
• American Research Council in Egypt Fellow (2017)
• College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board Fellow (2015-2018)
• Research Grants Committee, University of Alabama (2015)
• National Science Foundation Summer Travel Grant (2012)
• Research Grants Committee, University of Alabama (2011)
• Capstone International, University of Alabama (2010)
• Continuing Education Grant, University of Texas (2007)
• Gardner F. Marston Endowed History Fellow, University of Texas (2006)
• Fulbright-Hays Scholar (2005)
• Michael J. Hogan Fellow, Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (2004)
• Alice Jane Drysdal Sheffield Fellow in European History, University of Texas (2003)
• Dora Bonham Dissertation Grant, University of Texas (2002)
• Foreign Language Area Scholar, U.S. Department of State (2000-2003)

National, Regional, and University Positions

• Director, UA in Spain: Camino de Santiago Study Abroad program, June 2023-24.
• Director, UA in Oxford Study Abroad Program, July 2022-23, July 2023-24.
• Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of History, Univ. of Alabama, 2018-2022.
• Executive Board, Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, 2017-2021.

Books

• Voices Carry: Propaganda and Pretense in the Cold War Middle East, 1945-1967  (under review).
• with Erik L. Peterson, A Deeper Sickness: A Journal of America in the Pandemic Year (New York: Beacon Press, 2022).
• Documents from Modern Russia, co-ed. with Richard B. Spence (New York: Cognella Press, May, 2019).
• Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, August, 2015).

Digital Humanities Research

• with Erik L. Peterson, A Deeper Sickness: An Archive of America in the Pandemic Year (Tuscaloosa: Alabama Digital Humanities Center, 2022).

Journal Articles and Essays

• “Ahmed Said and the Personality of Persuasion: Voice of the Arabs in the 1950s,” (in progress).
• “The Children’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Politics of Childhood Trauma in the Late Cold War,” (in progress).
• “Vigilante Philanthropy: A History of CARE in Egypt in 1956,” Cold War History (under review).
• “Samantha Smith in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Kinship and Propaganda in the Late Cold War,” Diplomatic History (Winter 2018).
• “U.S.-Soviet Relations from the Russian Revolution to 1989,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia, ed. Jon Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• “Mendel Lives: The Survival of Mendelian Genetics in the Lysenkoist Classroom, 1937-1964,” Science and Education v24. no. 1-2 (Jan 2015): 101-14.
• “Cold War Consumption and the Marketing of Childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950-1960,” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (Fall, 2015).
• “The Perils of Building Cold War Consensus at the 1957 Moscow Festival of Youth and Students,” Cold War History 12 (August 2012): 515-35.
• “Broadcasting Benevolence: Images of the Child in Soviet, American, and NLF Propaganda to Vietnam, 1965-1973,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3 (Winter 2010): 15-38.
• “Duck and Cover: Children’s Cold War Experiences in 1950s America,” in Perspectives in American Social History: The Cold War and McCarthy Eras, ed. Caroline Emmons (New York: ABC-Clio, 2009).
• “Nauchnaia rabota: sem’ia i programma Fulbraita,” [“The Science of Work: Family and the Fulbright Program”], Poslednie Obnovleniia [Final Thoughts], Fall, 2005.

Selected Invited Lectures/Presentations/Documentaries

• Invited Speaker, “The Children’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,” Conference, “1983 Remembered,” London School of Economics, December, 2023.
• Keynote Speaker, “New Directions in Cold War Methods and Research,” Cold War Conference, Corvinus Univ., Budapest, Hungary, May 2023.
• Invited Speaker, “Research Methods in Cold War History,” The Wilson Center CWAR program, November, 2022.
• Invited Lecturer: “Lessons from the Propaganda Underground: How Cold War Optics can Help us Read our World,” invited speaker at the Harriman Center, Columbia University, October, 2019.
• Podcast Interview on Innocent Weapons with the New Books Network Podcast, January, 2019. https://newbooksnetwork.com/
• Podcast Interview with Dr. Sean Guillory on Propaganda and the Cold War, University of Pittsburgh, November, 2018.
• Invited Lecturer: “Selling Socialism in Suez: Soviet Radio Broadcasting to the MENA during the Suez Crisis,” invited lecturer at the “Socialist World, Third World, Media World,’ workshop, University College London, November, 2018.
• Invited Lecturer: “Samantha Smith in the Land of the Bolsheviks,” guest lecturer at The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, November, 2017.
• Invited Speaker: “The Politics of Kinship in the Late Cold War,” invited participant at the Research Group on Kinship and Politics at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld, Germany, May, 2017.
• Presentation: “Radio and Governmentality in the Middle East,” presenter at Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Texas-San Antonio, November, 2018.
• Invited Lecturer: “Propaganda and the Cold War,” visiting graduate seminar at The University of Texas-Austin (October, 2015) and Mississippi State University (November, 2015).
• Book Talks: on Innocent Weapons at Loyola University-New Orleans, The University of Alabama, The University of Texas-Austin, Mississippi State University.
• Invited Speaker: “Cold War Kids,” The Carolina Seminar, The University of North Carolina, November, 2012.
• Organizer: The First Russian Children’s History Colloquium, Paris, France, May, 2012.
• Documentary: Interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Company for a documentary entitled, “Love, Hate, and Propaganda: The Cold War,” Toronto, CA, February, 2011. Airing date: November 17, 2011.

Language Education

• Al-dibloom Almutawasiṭ Al-earabia – الدبلوم المتوسط العربية
  • Diploma in Intermediate Arabic Language, 2016
  • Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
• Diplom Nauk Russkogo Iazyka – Диплом наук русского языка
  • Diploma in Advanced Russian Language, 1992
  • Pushkin Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Advanced French
  • Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1990