Masha Kirasirova is a historian of the Soviet Union, the Middle East and the entanglements between them. She holds a doctorate in history and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, where her dissertation examined the "domestic" and "foreign" Easts of Soviet-Arab relations — work that became her first book, The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is also co-editor, with Eileen Kane and Margaret Litvin, of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford, 2023), named one of the American Library Association's Best Historical Materials of the year.

She is currently completing a second book, Building the Future: Developers, Artists and the Cold War in Egypt and the Gulf, a global intellectual history of development in the region across the second half of the 20th century. The book follows real estate developers, state planners and artists — among them Osman Ahmad Osman, the contractor who built the Aswan High Dam while quietly working to diminish his Soviet partners' public role — as they navigated Egypt's turn from Nasserist state capitalism to Sadat's economic opening and deepening integration with Gulf capital. Where her first book reconstructed Soviet perspectives on the Middle East largely through archives in Moscow and Tashkent, this project asks what the region's own developers, economists and artists made of the competing futures on offer during the Cold War.

Two edited projects extend this research in different directions. With artist Ala Younis, she co-directs "Visual Cultures of the Aswan High Dam," an interdisciplinary project bringing together historians and artists to examine the dam's afterlives in image, film and exhibition; the edited volume is forthcoming from The American University in Cairo Press. She is also co-editing, with a Saudi political theorist and a Kuwaiti historian, a special issue of Third World Quarterly on "Gulf and Arab Futurescapes: The Dialogue of Past, Present and Future," which grew out of a series of workshops she co-organized on how Gulf cities imagine and build their futures.

Kirasirova's connection to Cairo, and to AUC, runs deep: she first came to The American University in Cairo's Rare Books and Special Collections Library as a Presidential Intern from 2005 to 2006, and returns now to continue research and teaching in the city where her interest in this region first took shape.