He completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University in 2011 after which he worked as a lecturer at Harvard’s Literature and History program and as a postdoc at the Penn Humanities Forum. His dissertation entitled “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism” now serves as the basis of a book manuscript. As a Jordan fellow, he will work towards another book-length project, “Premature Postcolonialists: Soviet-Third-World Literary and Cinematic Encounters,” which reconstructs the history of the main organizations within which those encounters took place–the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (founded in Tashkent in 1958) and the biannual Tashkent Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Film (1968-1990)–and their consequences for Soviet and Third-World cultures.