He studied cultural studies and history at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), as well as in Toruń and Brno. From 2003 to 2006 he held a ZEIT Foundation doctoral scholarship in the programme ‘The Germans and Their Eastern Neighbours’. He then worked for a year and a half at the German Federal Foreign Office.
At the Viadrina, he completed his doctorate in 2010 and his habilitation in 2017, and held a postdoctoral fellowship in the International and Area Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He taught Eastern European history at Viadrina and served as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
From 2018 to 2024 he was Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Since November 2024 he has been Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute Warsaw. He has also contributed to exhibitions in Eisenhüttenstadt, Frankfurt (Oder) and Szczecin.
His work centres on the movement of people, objects and knowledge. It asks how infrastructure, political borders and cultural appropriation connect local experience to far-reaching transnational processes.
Research perspective