I came to the CEU Department of History after completing graduate programs in linguistics and politics. I was specializing in theories and practices of text analysis and publishing on contested cultures and nationalizing discourses in post-Soviet Central Asia. My PhD research in Comparative History has taken me to a new area. My present research interest is in the interplay between global political, military, and scientific developments and local everyday life in Soviet Central Asia during the period known as the Cold War. My dissertation project, Muslim Scientists, Muslim Battalions, Muslim Muslims: Sharora — a site of Cold War Connections (1950s-1990s), is a microstudy of significant changes in everyday life and intercommunal relations in rural Tajikistan during the Soviet rule. A village that became a kolkhoz and then turned into a “laboratory of development” was a scene of ethnic and religious diversity and a hub of out and inbound populations, ideas, and lifestyles. Through the inquiry into the daily life of Sharora residents, their transnational connections and influences, career options, and celebrations that produced situations of hybridity I hope to uncover different repertoires of being ‘Soviet.’