I am an award-winning historian of Modern Europe and Associate Professor of History at George Mason University

I focus on the social and political history of twentieth-century Germany and am broadly interested in how everyday life intersects with and shapes the relationships between citizens and states. My research interests include the history of gender and sexuality, legal history, and the history of democracy.

I received my PhD from Stanford University in 2019. Before coming to Stanford, I took my Bachelor's Degree summa cum laude in German and Mathematics at Amherst College, a Master of Science in Applicable Mathematics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and worked as a Legal Assistant at a Boston law firm. My Erdös number is three.

My first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany, examines gay persecution and liberation in Germany during the Cold War and was published with University of Toronto Press in March 2022. Tracing the experiences of gay men in East and West Germany, States of Liberation argues that simplistic, Cold-War-era understandings of an oppressive, communist East and a liberal, capitalist West fail to account for the idiosyncratic ways that anti-gay animus and gay liberation efforts evolved in each country. States of Liberation was awarded the 2023 David Barclay Book Prize from the German Studies Association and the 2022 Charles E. Smith Award from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. It was also a finalist for the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize.

I am also the author of A Queer Theory of the State, published by Floating Opera Press in December 2023 as part of its Critic’s Essay Series. The volume asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, it argues that the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.

I am currently at work on two new books. The first is a history of lesbian women in Nazi Germany, about which I have already published in Central European History and Journal of Contemporary History. The second is a new history of the Allied Occupation of Germany after World War Two, retelling the story of Germany’s denazification and democratization from the perspective of ordinary Germans.

I am also the Project Director of the East German Poster Database, a digital project funded by a Fenwick Fellowship from the George Mason University Libraries, which will make the University’s collection of seven thousand posters from the GDR available to researchers and students.

I happily give interviews about my research, German history, and LGBTQ issues, and I have advised on historical films. I write regularly for public venues including Boston Review, The Point, and Los Angeles Review of Books.