My research crosses back and forth between literary studies and history. My book Worlds of Dissent combines approaches from both disciplines to offer a new approach to the dissident movements in East Central Europe under Communism. I teach graduate and undergraduate courses on Czech literature, history, and culture, as well as comparative European literatures more generally. I am particularly interested in the relationships between literature and political power: the mechanics of political crackdown and repression; dissent, protest, and dissident movements; and the complex negotiations between repressive regimes and the writers they are trying to control. I also study conceptions and ideologies of Central European identity; language and narrative form in first-person writing; and literary theory and theory of literary history. I translate Czech prose and poetry, and have edited and translated a book of poems by Ivan Wernisch, In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963-2005.