Her research and teaching focus on the contemporary and twentieth century politics of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. She conducts her research in Russia, Hungary, and Ukraine, where she is interested in the experiences of ordinary people who live far from capital cities. Much of her work focuses on the enclosure of public resources, the constitution of material and social power, and political and social processes of dispossession. She asks how shifts in political economy shape shape everyday people's lives, and how those effects translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on archival sources as well as a variety of immersion-based methods, including participant-observation research.