I am Associate Professor of Literary & Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). My research interests are diverse, and revolve around the multifaceted question of how (popular) culture imagines and confronts ‘the past’. I focus primarily on the countries of the former socialist world, and on Russia in particular. In my monograph Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), I analyzed literary narratives of cultural trauma from the 1990s, and explored their contrasts and entanglements with emerging stories of wished-for national and imperial revival in the early Putin-era. More recently, I have begun to delve into the slippery phenomenon of nostalgia, both in Russia and beyond. Together with Ksenia Robbe (University of Groningen) and Otto Boele (Leiden University) I have co-edited a volume on cultural expressions of (counter-)nostalgia in the ex-Soviet republics (Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies, Routledge 2019). In 2021 I started my ERC-funded research project CONSPIRATORIAL MEMORY: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe (2021-2026). Here I combine my fascination with memory and temporality with my deep curiosity for conspiracy culture. Together with my team, I explore prominent conspiracy stories in Central and East European literature, film, television, commemorative rituals and online culture.