Drawing on Polish, US, French, British and German archival documents, I examine the encounters between Western and Polish participants at the International Trade Fair in the Polish city of Poznań in the 1950s and 1960s. Challenging the predominant Cold War framework, I show that Westerners who came to Poznań drew on power and privilege while pursuing personal interests. These encounters are best seen in the context of a relationship between Westerners and East Europeans that spans decades, and even centuries, and that involved encounters fraught with contestation over economic power and cultural dominance.

This photo essay examines photojournalist Lisa Larsen's experiences in the Soviet Union in the period from spring through fall of 1956. It concentrates on her written and visual explorations of what it meant to be a woman in the USSR against the backdrop of her long standing interests in the roles of women in society worldwide during her work for Life magazine. I show that Larsen's visual and written storytelling goes far beyond the commonplaces of midcentury America. I suggest that it is helpful to understand her 1956 visit to the Soviet Union in the broader context of her biography. The article also aims to highlight more of Lisa Larsen’s photography, much of which has never been published anywhere and remains unknown.

Here I engage with Lisa Larsen’s pioneering work as a photojournalist for Life Magazine in Poland, 1956-1957, contextualized by her experience as a Jewish exile from Germany in the 1930s. Reading her unpublished writings about Poland against the backdrop of her visual work reveals a woman who appreciated the ambiguity of photography and sought to shape the meaning of her work in a way that challenged the prevailing Cold War epistemologies of midcentury America, often espoused by Life and the Time/Life empire itself. As a woman, she was initially assigned entertainment and fashion work, but her drive to cover politics led her to cover US presidential campaigns, the Middle East, the Bandung Conference of 1955 and to the USSR. I draw on her unpublished writings, as well as some published material and her extraordinary photographs to argue that through her writing about and photographic work in Poland, Larsen engaged in a subtle critique of the social relations in the United States.

In this article I engage with regional, international and spatial histories to think through Poland's alternative identity shaped by regional values of industriousness and hard work rather than themes from Romantic past. I focus on the fascinating afterlives of Hans Poelzig's "Upper Silesia Tower," originally built for the Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in 1911.

Co-edited with Austin Jersild, this collection explores how international exchanges of people, ideas, and cultural practices helped shape the socialist world during the Cold War. Drawing on previously inaccessible archival sources, the contributors examine literature, cinema, architecture, youth festivals, cultural diplomacy, and other forms of interaction that connected the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the wider world. The volume challenges the conventional image of the Soviet bloc as a monolithic entity controlled from Moscow, revealing instead a complex and interconnected socialist world shaped by cooperation, competition, and the often unintended consequences of international exchange.

Drawing on extensive research in Russian and Polish archives, this book examines Soviet efforts to build and legitimize a new empire in Eastern Europe through cultural diplomacy, propaganda, and international cooperation after World War II. Focusing on the encounters and negotiations between Soviet and Polish officials, intellectuals, journalists, and cultural figures, it reveals the complexities and contradictions of an imperial project that relied on persuasion as well as coercion. The book argues that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined its own efforts to win popular support, exposing the fundamental limitations of Soviet soft power and helping explain the long-term fragility of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe.

Co-edited with Kenyon Zimmer, Cold War Crossings explores the movement of people, ideas, and cultural practices across the ideological and political boundaries of the Cold War, challenging the conventional image of a world neatly divided by the Iron Curtain. It highlights how encounters between East and West created opportunities for exchange, negotiation, and mutual influence, even amid intense geopolitical rivalry.

Taking the classic historiography of Soviet-East European relations as a departure point, I argue that the traditional narrative about Sovietization and its undoing no longer accommodates the complex patterns of cross-border interactions within the Soviet Bloc. Despite the region’s relative isolation and internal atomization during the second half of the 20th century, East-Central Europe can be viewed as an “interface” between cultural, intellectual and social projects spanning other parts of the world; concepts such as empire and "the Second World," I suggest, can be useful in conceptualizing such linkages.