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ACADEMIC WRITING

My academic research focuses on Cold War-era borders and their dismantling. It brings together such diverse disciplines as geography, art history, anthropology, religious studies, and media studies. To view my articles, follow me on Academia.edu.

The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border

 

ISBN-13: 978-0226154190

 

uncovers a German wall that didn't fall in 1989. Since the early 1950s, the so-called "prayer wall" contoured the western outline of the border between former Czechoslovakia and West Germany. This civilian chain of pilgrimage sites and monuments grew strong on the area's far-reaching literary traditions, folklore, and florid popular piety. It fed off Cold War fears diverse enough to range from atheism to deforestation. It lured throngs of visitors to the quiet environs where Central Europe's legendary forests - Bohemian and Bavarian - touched. The book is a guide to the emergence, infrastructure, and uses of this new landscape.

Transcontinental and Transatlantic: Radio Free Europe in the Golden Age of Television


is the first televisual history of Radio Free Europe (RFE), arguably the most influential broadcaster across the Cold War border and the only international Cold War radio station to have been born in the golden age of American television. The book breaks with the long tradition of chronicling RFE’s political accomplishments to ask: What did television do for RFE and, conversely, what did RFE do for television?

 

En route, it delivers a fascinating interdisciplinary analysis of how America's leading "Mad Men" tried to fashion RFE into a new consumer icon; how television's top talent attempted to convert RFE's most titillating anecdotes into small-screen entertainment; where the station's German engineers fit in this radio's picture; and why the broadcaster's memory could become so lopsided: visual in the West and aural in the East.

 

Eastern Europe Unmapped

 

is a volume that I am currently co-editing with my colleague Irene Kacandes. Eastern Europe, we put forth, has been infinitely more than merely "the lands between" Russia and the West (Alexander V. Prusin). The volume unmaps the area to show how, at various points in history, this part of the world resisted the cartographic mandate as much as other contiguities: linguistic, temporal, intellectual, ethnic, and religious. Instead, the contributors uncover and reflect upon alternative categories, images, histories, and self-designations that Eastern Europeans and their non-neighbors devised or borrowed to situate the region in a new set of coordinates, tacitly or quite explicitly resisting the traditional ones.

 

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