Department Faculty

“My research interests center broadly on how discursive forms of ideology shape social and cultural practices in everyday life. I am especially interested in how these dynamics operated in socialist countries and continue to do so in the aftermath of the demise of socialist regimes. My research to date has focused on such issues as religion, nationalism and diaspora studies, specifically in Ukraine and more generally in the Soviet Union. I am the author of Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism and Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine and co-editor of Religion, Morality and Community in Post-Soviet Societies. I am currently writing a book on how Soviet policies of secularization were experienced in Western Ukrainian territories annexed to the USSR during World War II. I look at how secularizing policies were interwoven with attempts to Sovietize this multiethnic and multiconfessional population. I employ a variety of methods in my research beyond archival work, including semi-structured interviews, life history narratives, and ethnographic methods of participant observation.”