Leah Valtin-Erwin

Originally from Virginia, Leah Valtin-Erwin (she/her) holds a PhD in Eastern European history at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research tracks the expansion of German and Austrian supermarket chains into former East Germany, Poland, and Romania after the fall of communism in 1989, emphasizing the role of foreign direct investment in economic and cultural integration projects prior to the formal enlargement of the European Union. In her dissertation, she argued that seemingly mundane spaces of daily life such as supermarkets constituted central sites of encounter, discovery, and exchange between Eastern and Western Europe after the end of the Cold War.