Alexey Golubev is Associate Professor of Russian History at the University of Houston. During the academic year 2020–21, he served as the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Killam Trusts, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, German Historical Institute in Moscow, and the Russian Foundation for Humanities. He is the author of The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Michigan State University Press, 2014, with Irina Takala).