In her research, Heather D. DeHaan examines the making of Eurasian urban spaces. Her first book, Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power, spoke to the politics of urban planning in Stalin-era Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia, highlighting the complex ethical, political and technical challenges faced by urban planners in that era. For DeHaan, it also raised questions about the popular experience of and involvement in making cities, prompting her to turn her research agenda to everyday urban life, with particular focus on regions far from the ethnically Russian centers of Soviet power. Her current project, In the Neighborhood of Empire: Baku Communities After WWII, explores neighborhood politics, youth life, popular culture, and the flow of goods and peoples within Baku, Azerbaijan, as well as across Soviet space and into adjacent Turkey, Iran and Europe. Through this research, she proposes new ways to think about race, class, gender and geography in Soviet society and across the region. Please check out her interview, which profiles her work.
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