About me
I am a Professor of Digital Humanities, with a focus on images and digital objects, in the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-
I am a Digital Humanist with a PhD in Cultural History. My expertise lies in the computational analysis of audiovisual culture, digital objects, and digital history, with a particular focus on cultural memory and Russian and Polish history. My research examines how knowledge is formed, circulates, and is represented through different media, and how worldviews take shape across time and space. I develop computational approaches that enable the study of these processes at scale and over long temporal horizons.
My current work focuses on changing representations of the world in digitised historical newsreels. I have analysed visual discourses in Soviet newsreels in the post-Second World War period and led the Kinokroonika project on Estonian newsreel history. Earlier projects include research on the global circulation of news in the nineteenth-century press (OceanicExchanges) and the spread of pseudohistorical content on the Russian-language internet in the 2000s (Pseudohistory). In addition, I have contributed to discussions on best practices for interdisciplinary research in Digital Humanities and have published extensively on Soviet cultural history, particularly Soviet contacts abroad. I co-authored a monograph on Yves Montand’s tour of the Soviet Union. My PhD thesis, “Creation of a Market Place: The Polish Clothing Industry, the Soviet Union, and the Rise of Marketing, 1949–1961” (2017), explored the cultural history of trading practices during the profound cultural transformations of the late 1950s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
From 2024 to 2026, I worked at the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, on the DIGHT-net project on digital cultural heritage. Previously, I was a Senior Research Fellow at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab CUDAN at Tallinn University (2020–2024) and a researcher on the Digital History project within the History of Innovation and Industrialisation (HIIVA) research group at Aalto University (2017–2018). I was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley (2014–2015) and participated in the Culture Analytics long programme at IPAM, UCLA, in spring 2016. I completed my PhD as a member of the Finnish–Russian Network in Russian and Eurasian Studies (FRRESH), hosted by the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki.