Andy Bruno is an environmental historian of Russia and the Soviet Union with an interest in many aspects of human interactions with the natural world. My main scholarly ambition has been to demonstrate the pertinence of environmental perspectives to major questions in Russian and Eurasian history. This goal has led me to write about animals and avalanches, climate and conservation, energy and economy, geology and gender, labor and lakes, mysteries and meteorites, revolution and reindeer, subjectivity and socialism, waste and warfare, and other themes. In my work, I highlight the potency of non-human nature and place Russia’s environmental history in comparative and global contexts. A focus on specific locations, such as borderlands in the Arctic and the Siberian wilderness, also characterizes my scholarship.

I am currently working on two book projects. One will reconsider the growth imperative under Soviet socialism in light of recent theorizing about the Anthropocene and prospects for degrowth and the other will follow anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin’s return to Russia in 1917 as a means to reflect on the political ecology of the Bolshevik revolution.

I am the Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History at Indiana University Bloomington. Previously, I worked as a Professor in the Department of History and Faculty Associate in Environmental Studies at Northern Illinois University. My first book, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. I have also published journal articles in Environmental History, Slavic Review, Kritika, Isis, The Russian Review, WIREs Climate Change, Ab Imperio, REGION, and the International Review of Social History and chapters in several edited volumes. My second book, Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy, came out with Cambridge University Press in 2022.

I was also part of a three-year project (2020-2022), “Imaginary Anthropocene: Environmental Knowledge Production and Transfers in Siberia in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (Project No 20-68-46044). The project was based at the Center “Human, Environment & Technology” at Tyumen State University.

Earlier in my career I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Science / Environmental History of the North at Florida State University (2011-2013) and a Visiting Scholar in “Threatened Orders” Collaborative Research Center at the University of Tübingen (2013). I received my BA in history from Reed College (2003), MA in Russian studies from the European University at Saint Petersburg (2004), and PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2011).

My research has been generously supported by various agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Program, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For 2017-2018, I have also been awarded a Fellowship in Aerospace History from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the History of Science Society to study the history of the Tunguska explosion of 1908 and the efforts to understand it.