I am a PhD student in the Department of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. I obtained my B.A. in History from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York in 2021. Then went on to work at Wegmans Food Markets for 4 years in the Philadelphia area, ending my career with them after 10 years. During that time, in various positions, I was in charge of running the store, managing over 400 employees, setting up and facilitating training classes, company-wide application rollouts, and the store’s Sustainability project. One achievement was increasing my store’s Sustainability score from ~82% to 89%; effectively keeping over 200,000+ lbs a month out of local landfills within my year and half as project lead. However, my proudest achievement was increasing donation lbs by 150% to an average of 31,000+ pounds per month. Every pound was donated to local charitable organizations. Since then, and so starting in 2025, I have returned to academia to study Russian and Soviet history with a particular focus on its final three decades before collapse. I am particularly interested in its cultural and political impact on former Soviet Socialist Republics and Russia. My most recent research investigated the relationship between Soviet nostalgia, memory, and political power in post-Soviet Poland.
As for the me outside of my work: I love all topics of history (except Victorian England) but my favorites are the Soviet Union, Roman, Byzantine histories. I love animals of all kinds and my favorite pets are cats (I have two). Sometime in the future I would like to own some ducks and a duck pond. I don’t think they would be allowed in the house though due to a no muddy shoes rule. My favorite movie is The Thing (1982) and I currently have 587 movies logged on Letterboxd. I spend a lot of time watching movies so if you ever have any movie recommendations or want to talk movies in general, I am always up for a discussion
– Will Hafer
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