As a modern European historian, I write about Polish and German societies using trans-regional and comparative perspectives to interrogate national identities and uncover the historical experiences that link Eastern Europe to other parts of the world. I consider the region as a place shaped by intersecting local and global histories that cannot be understood without the process of empire and nation-building and the establishment of colonial systems in the nineteenth century. My forthcoming book, Jewish Experiences across the Americas: Local Histories through Global Lenses, a collection of essays I have co-edited with Katalin Rac, uses a transnational framework to explore the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish history and Jewish cultural diversity in the Americas across five centuries. Analyzing historical processes across empires and colonial settings has been one of the contributions that I have made to the field of German and East Europe.