I am a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig, where I lead the DFG-funded project Unlearning the Soviet: Decolonisation of Soviet Spatial Imaginaries.

I work as an ethnographer of knowledge production. The question running through all of my research is how imperial power reproduces itself after the empire is formally gone — through the classifications, curricula, museum displays, and habits of seeing that outlive the states that built them. I began with the institutions themselves: my monograph Russia's Regional Museums (Routledge, 2022) showed how provincial museums manufacture a consensual past by curating silence around state violence, and my earlier work traced how Soviet geography and educational cartography taught generations where — and who — they were. The war has pushed this question out of the archive and into the present. My current research follows imperial knowledge as it travels with people: with Russian migrants meeting anti-imperial refusal in Georgia, and with the contested naming of glaciers in the Pamirs, where I ask who holds the authority to inscribe a landscape.

I came to academia through contemporary art and curation at the Rodchenko School, and exhibition practice remains part of my method — decolonisation, for me, is as much a problem of display as of theory. I am an editor of Eurasian Geography and Economics, co-chair of the ICA Working Group on Peace and Conflict Cartography, and in September 2026 I join Princeton's PIIRS as a Fung Global Fellow.