He received his PhD in 2004 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in 2005 his dissertation was awarded the Fritz Stern Prize for the best dissertation in German History by the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His first monograph, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic was published in 2008. From 2007-2009 he held an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellowship in Germany as a fellow of the Zentrum fur Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam.