Drawing on ethnographic and archival methods, her research engages questions of human transformability: how people live their lives through shifting socioeconomic and political conditions, and how various religious and secular institutions appeal to the human capacity to change habits and convictions, while attempting to steer it in particular directions. Geographically, she is particularly interested in multi-ethnic and multi-religious areas such as Russia’s Volga region, where ideological transformations get bound up with changing perceptions of self and other. She has published two books on Soviet atheism and its effects on post-Soviet religion and historical memory: Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (Indiana, 2011) and Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge (Oxford, 2015).