Dr. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College (1989) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1994) and taught at Pomona College before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 2002.
Dr. Platt works on history and memory in Russia and Eastern Europe, Russian and Latvian lyric poetry, global socialist and Russian cultures, representations of Russian, Baltic and Soviet history. He is the author or editor of a number of books, most recently Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders (Cornell/Northern Illinois University Press, 2024). He is founder and convener of the periodic poetry translation symposium Your Language My Ear.
Dr. Platt’s current project is a study of global cultural exchange in the twentieth century entitled Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds: How Transnational Exchange Defined Cold War Cultures. He is also working on a study of history and memory in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
