ANDY BRUNO
Department of History
Northern Illinois University
Zulauf Hall 726
DeKalb, IL 60115
abruno2@niu.edu
EMPLOYMENT
Professor, Department of History, Northern Illinois University, 2023-
Associate Professor, Department of History, Northern Illinois University, 2017-2023
Leading Research Fellow, School for Environmental and Social Studies, Tyumen State University, 2020-2022
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Northern Illinois University, 2012-2017
Visiting Scholar of the “Threatened Orders” Collaborative Research Center, University of Tübingen, May-July 2013
Postdoctoral Fellow, History of Science/Environmental History of the North [funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF ARC 0922651)], Department of History, Florida State University, 2011-2013
Editorial Assistant, Slavic Review, 2008-2009
EDUCATION
PhD in History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011
MA in Russian Studies, European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2004
BA in History, Reed College, 2003
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
* Finalist for the George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History
* Honorable mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for an outstanding monograph on Russian, East European, or Eurasian history from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
* Russian translation: Priroda sovetskoi vlasti: Ekologicheskaia istoriia Arktiki (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, forthcoming 2024).
Journal Articles
“Atomic Visitors from Outer Space: The Tunguska Nuclear Hypothesis in Soviet Technological Imagination,” The Russian Review 81, no. 1 (January 2022): 92-109.
“Studying the Siberian Anthropocene: An Introduction,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 48, no. 3 (November 2021): 257-261.
“Environmental Subjectivities from the Soviet North,” Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-22.
“Climate History of Russia and the Soviet Union,” WIREs Climate Change 9, no. 5 (September/October 2018), doi: 10.1002/wcc.534.
“A Tale of Two Reindeer: Pastoralism and Preservation in the Soviet Arctic,” REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 6, no. 2 (2017): 251–271.
“A Eurasian Mineralogy: Aleksandr Fersman’s Conception of the Natural World,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 107, no. 3 (September 2016): 518-539.
“Tumbling Snow: Vulnerability to Avalanches in the Soviet North,” Environmental History 18, no. 4 (October 2013): 683-709.
“Industrial Life in a Limiting Landscape: An Environmental Interpretation of Stalinist Social Conditions in the Far North,” International Review of Social History 55, S18 (December 2010): 153-174.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
“Creating the Soviet Arctic, 1917-1991” (with Ekaterina Kalemeneva) in Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts, eds., Cambridge History of the Polar Regions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 462-486.
“Polluted Pearl of the North: Lake Imandra in the Anthropocene” in David Moon, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova, eds., Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (Cambridgeshire: White Horse Press, 2021), 69-91.
“How a Rock Remade the Soviet North: Nepheline in the Khibiny Mountains,” in Nicholas Breyfogle, ed., Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 147-164.
Republished in an abridged Russian translation: “Rol´ nefelina v ekologicheskoi istorii Khibinskikh gor,” Ural´skii istoricheskii vestnik 75, no. 2 (2022): 97-105.
“What Does it Mean to Liberate a Land? Toward an Environmental History of the Russian Revolution,” in Christopher Read, Peter Waldron, and Adele Lindenmeyr, eds., Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22, Book 3: National Disintegration (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2018), 157-177.
“Making Reindeer Soviet: The Appropriation of an Animal on the Kola Peninsula,” in Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, eds., Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 117-137.
Conference Proceedings
“An Archival and Oral History of the Tunguska Explosion,” Meteoritics and Planetary Science 56, no. s1 (August 2021): 6178.
“Perekhodia granitsy prirody: letniaia onlain-shkola i kruglyi stol po ekologicheskoi istorii” [Transcending Nature: Online Summer School and Roundtalbe on Environmental History] (with T. N. Rakov, A. V. Vinogradov, E. I. Gololobov, J. A. Lajus, E. A. Kochetkova, R. Gilmintinov, and M. Koskina), Vestnik Surgutskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta, no. 6, 69 (2020): 186-191.
“Conservation and Industry in the Soviet North: A Reflection on the Trade-Offs between National and Transnational Environmental Histories” in Ekologicheskaia istoriia v Rossii: etapy stanovleniia i perspektivnye napravleniia issledovanii [Environmental History in Russia: Stages of Development and Promising Research Directions] (Elabuga: Elabuga Institute of the Kazan Federal University, 2014), 32-48.
“Kol´skii kraeved v amerikanskoi istoriografii Rossii: Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, ego lichnost´ i idei” [“A Kola Regional-Studies Scholar in American Historiography of Russia: Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, His Personality and Ideas”] in Piatye Ushakovskie cheteniia: Sbornik nauchnikh statei [Fifth Ushakov Readings: A Collection of Scholarly Articles] (Murmansk: Murmansk State Pedagogical University, 2008), 82-87.
“Obrazy prirody v ofitsial´nom diskurse vo vremia nachal´nogo etapa industrializatsii Kol´skogo polyostrova,” [“Images of Nature in Official Discourse during the First Stage of Industrialization of the Kola Peninsula”] in Ushakovskie cheteniia: Materialy pervoi nauchno-prakticheskoi mezhregional´noi kraevedcheskoi konferentsii pamiati professora I. F. Ushakova [Ushakov Readings: Materials of the First Scientific-Practical Inter-regional Regional-studies Conference in Memory I. F. Ushakov] (Murmansk: Murmansk State Pedagogical University, 2004), 118-123.
Review Essays
“A New Environmental History of Socialist States,” review of Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures in Monthly Review 74, no. 4 (September 2022): 53-62.
“An Anthropocene History of Central Asia,” commentary on Maya Peterson’s Pipes Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 23, no. 2 (Spring 2022): 339-344.
“Writ in Water,” review of Janet Hartley, The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River in History Today 71, no. 3 (March 2021): 98-99.
Comment on Andrew Stuhl, Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands in H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 9, no. 1 (January 2019): 25-29.
“Money and Monetary Policy in the Soviet Union,” review of Kristy Ironside, “The Value of a Ruble: A Social History of Money in Postwar Soviet Russia, 1945-1964” for Dissertation Reviews (December 2015).
“The Environment of Postwar Stalinism,” review of Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943-1953 in History Workshop Journal 72, no. 1 (October 2011): 315-320.
“Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 635-650.
Book Reviews
Review of Charlotte Wrigley, Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic in The Russian Review 82, no. 4 (October 2023): 737-738.
Review of Stuart A. Harris, Anatoli Brouchkov, and Cheng Guodong, Geocryology: Characteristics and Use of Frozen Ground and Permafrost Landforms in Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 12, no. 1 (2023): 39-42.
Review of Thane Gustafson, Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 57, no. 1-2 (April 2023): 255-257.
Review of Jennifer Keating, On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia in Environmental History 28, no. 2 (April 2023): 423-435.
Review of David Moon, The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s in The Journal of Russian American Studies 5, no. 2 (November 2021):199-200.
Review of Cynthia Ruder, Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space in The Russian Review 79, no. 1 (January 2020): 141-142.
Review of Julia Herzberg, Christian Kehrt, and Franziska Torma, eds., Ice and Snow in the Cold War. Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, E-reviews, no. 4 (2019): 33-36.
Review of Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union in Agricultural History 93, no. 4(Fall 2019): 757-759.
Review of Ian Helfant, That Savage Gaze: Wolves in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Imagination in Slavic Review 78, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 869-870.
Review of Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia in Journal of the History of Biology 51, no. 4 (November 2018): 883-885, doi: 10.1007/s10739-018-9542-y.
Review of Nigel A. Raab, All Shook Up: The Shifting Soviet Response to Catastrophes, 1917–1991 in The American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (June 2018): 1048-1049.
Review of Robert W. Orttung, ed., Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities: Resource Politics, Migration, and Climate Change in The Russian Review 76, no. 3 (July 2017): 586-587.
Review of Jonathan D. Oldfield and Denis J. B Shaw, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment in The Slavonic and East European Review 94, no. 3 (July 2016): 543-545.
Review of David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914 in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 99, no. 337 (October 2014): 695-697.
Review of Paul Josephson, et al., An Environmental History of Russia in Isis 105, no. 3 (September 2014): 625-626.
Review of Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ed., The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc in Journal of Transport History 34, no. 2 (December 2013): 206-207.
Review of Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism in The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921-1928, v. 6 (2012): 68-72.
Review of Laura A. Henry, Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 234-236.
Review of Niobe Thompson, Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier in The Northern Review: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Arts and Social Sciences of the North, no. 31 (Fall 2009): 257-262.
Popular and Other Writing
“Thinking Cosmically: An Interview with Andy Bruno,” (by Garret McDonald) Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (October 2, 2023).
“What Asteroids Can Teach Us about Climate Change,” Zócalo Public Square (September 25, 2023).
“Behind the Times: What We Talk About When We Talk About Tunguska,” History Today 73, no. 6(June 2023): 84-87.
“Encountering the Mysterious Landscape of the Tunguska Explosion,” NYU Jordan Center Blog (October 18, 2022).
“What is International Asteroid Day All About?” Fifteen Eighty-Four (July 7, 2022).
“In Memoriam: Maya Peterson,” (with Indira Peterson) Slavic Review 81, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 295-296.
“After Four-Year First Contract Fight, Northern Illinois Faculty Secure COVID Protections,” (with Beatrix Hoffman, Mark Schuller, and Simón Weffer) Labor Notes (August 19, 2020).
“The 1908 Tunguska Event and the Threats of Tomorrow,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (June 2018).
“The Russian Revolution from Behind Bars,” (with Mark Steinberg) NewsNet: News of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 57, n. 5 (October 2017): 4-5.
“Can Socialism Save the Planet?” Edge Effects (January 26, 2017.
“Into a Frozen Inferno: Personal and Historical Trajectories in Monchegorsk,” Toxic News (August 3, 2016.
“The Page 99 Test on The Nature of Soviet Power,” (June 9, 2016).
WORKSHOP AND EDITING PROJECTS
Guest editor of the two-part special issue, “Studies of the Siberian Anthropocene,” of The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review in vol. 48, no. 3 (November 2021) and vol. 49, no. 1 (February 2022)
“Climate and Society in Eurasia: Past, Present, Future” (with Pey-Yi Chu) at the Summer Research Laboratory of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, June 2020 and June 2021 (online)
PRESENTATIONS
Conferences
“The Tunguska Event in Post-Soviet Environmental Imaginaries,” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Chicago, IL, November 2022
“Viewing the Landscape of an Asteroid Disaster from Afar: A History of NASA’s Investigations of the Tunguska Event of 1908” at the “History of NASA and the Environment Symposium” in Washington, DC, September 2022
“What Can a Cosmic Collision Teach Us about Climate Change? The 1908 Tunguska Explosion and Environmental Perils of the Future” at the Midwest Slavic Conference in Columbus, OH, April 2022
“Indigenous Experiences with the Tunguska Explosion of 1908” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Eugene, OR, March 2022
“The Tunguska Event in Soviet Ufology” at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society (online), November 2021
“A Gulag Geologist Addicted to the Taiga: The Environmental Subjectivity of Boris Vronskii” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in New Orleans, LA, November 2021
“The History of Lake Imandra in the Soviet Anthropocene” at “Zemlia vody”: resurs, ugroza, obraz [“Land of Water”: Resource, Threat, and Image] in Surgut, Russia (online), 2021
“Voluntary Siberian Science as Part of the Soviet Great Experiment: The Case of Independent Tunguska Investigations” Prostranstvo velikikh eksperimentov [The Space of Great Experiments] in Tobolsk, Russia, October 2021
“Working Toward the Climate History of Russia” at Vse meniaetsia: klimat, obshchestvo, landshafty v istoricheskoi perspective [Everything Changes: Climate, Society, and Landscapes in Historical Perspective] in Tyumen, Russia, October 2021
“An Archival and Oral History of the Tunguska Explosion” (poster) at the Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Chicago, IL, August 2021
“Indigenous Dispossession in Russian Lapland: Reindeer Conservation and Collective Farm Consolidation in the Kola North” at the International Congress of Arctic Social Science X, online/Arkhangelsk, Russia, June 2021
“Making the Soviet Arctic Livable: Urbanization Models in the Soviet North” (with Ekaterina Kalemeneva) at Global´naiai istoriia Arktiki: transgranichnye seti, al´ternativnye prostranstva i perekliuchenie masshtabov [Global History of the Arctic: Transboundary Networks, Alternative Spaces, and Shifting Scales], online, May 2021
“Converging Ideas above the Iron Curtain: International Exchanges in the Science of Tunguska during the Cold War” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in San Francisco, CA, November 2019
“Lake Imandra in the Soviet Anthropocene” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston, MA, December 2018
“Discovering another Civilization through an ‘Othered’ People: Investigations of Radioactivity at the Site of the Tunguska Explosion” at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Seattle, WA, November 2018
“Neskol´ko slov ob istorii izucheniia Tungusskogo vzryva: novye arkhivnye nakhodki [A Few Words about the History of Studying the Tunguska Explosion: New Archival Findings]” at Problemy i gipotezy izucheniia Tungusskogo fenomena [Problems and Hypotheses in the Study of the Tunguska Phenomenon] in Krasnoyarsk and at Tungusskii fenomen [Tunguska Phenomenon] in Vanavara, June 2018
“Polluted Pearl of the North: The Story of Lake Imandra” (plenary session) at the International Water History Association conference in Grand Rapids, MI, June 2017
“Metallic Landscapes of the Soviet North: Pollution in the Town of Monchegorsk” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Chicago, IL, March 2017
“Self and Nature in the Soviet North” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Philadelphia, PA, November 2015
“A Tale of Two Reindeer: Pastoralism and Preservation in the Soviet Arctic” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Washington, DC, March 2015
“Conservationists and Industrialists in the Soviet North” at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, DC, January 2014
“What Does it Mean to Liberate a Land?: Toward an Environmental History of the Revolutionary Era in Russia” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC, November 2011
“Stalinist Industrialization and the Vulnerability of Forced Laborers” at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle, WA, April 2011
“Railroad Colonization and the Arctic Environment in War and Revolution” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Portland, OR, March 2010
“Life and Environment during the Construction of a Socialist City: The Experience of the ‘Special Settlers’ in the Khibiny Mountains” at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston, MA, November 2009
“Of Rocks and Reindeer: Making Sense of State-Socialist Modernization and the Environment” at the World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden, August 2009
“The Waste that Does Everything and Nothing: Industrialists’ Dreams and Nature’s Intractability” at the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies in Charlottesville, VA, March 2009
“Aleksandr Fersman and the Place of the Natural World in Soviet Industrialization” at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Philadelphia, PA, November 2008
“Kol´skii kraeved v amerikanskoi istoriografii Rossii: Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, ego lichnost´ i idei” [“A Kola Regional-Studies Scholar in American Historiography of Russia: Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, His Personality and Ideas”] at Ushakovskie cheteniia [Ushakov Readings] in Murmansk, Russia, May 2008
“Toward an Environmental History of Modernization in the Soviet North” at the conference of the European Society for Environmental History in Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2007
“The Ideology of ‘Backwardness’ and the Natural World in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Baton Rouge, LA, March 2007
“Obrazy prirody v ofitsial´nom diskurse vo vremia nachal´nogo etapa industrializatsii Kol´skogo polyostrova” [“Images of Nature in Official Discourse during the First Stage of Industrialization of the Kola Peninsula”] at Ushakovskie cheteniia [Ushakov readings] in Murmansk, Russia, March 2004
Invited Talks
“The Mystery of the Siberian Explosion: An Environmental History of the Tunguska Event,” Naperville Astronomical Association, July 2023
“The Mystery of the Siberian Explosion: An Environmental History of the Tunguska Event,” Edgerton Public Library, May 2023
“The Mystery of the Siberian Explosion: An Environmental History of the Tunguska Event,” Moraine Valley Community College, March 2023
Presenter on “When the Earth Cracked: Visions of Ecology on Art and the Environment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia at Yale University, online, November 2022
“The Mystery of the Siberian Explosion: An Environmental History of the Tunguska Event” at NASA History Office, online, October 2022
Book presentation on Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy at Northern Illinois University, October 2022
“The Mystery of the Siberian Explosion: An Environmental History of the Tunguska Event” at the University of Maryland at Baltimore Country, September 2022
Book presentation on Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy at Tyumen State University, online, September 2022
“The Mystery of the Siberian Explosion: An Environmental History of the Tunguska Event” at the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies of the University of California-Berkeley, online, April 2022
“Environmental Humanities and the Anthropocene” at Nauka, Liderstvo, Obshchestvo – 2050 [Science, Leadership, Society], online, October 2021
“From the Crystals of the Urals to a Mysterious Taiga Landscape in Siberia: A History of the Tunguska State Nature Reserve” at the Center “Human, Nature, Technology” of Tyumen State University, August 2021
“Environmental Subjectivities from the Soviet North,” at the Center “Human, Nature, Technology” of Tyumen State University (online), November 2020
“Disaster History and the Russian North” at the School of Scientific Leadership at Scientific-Educational Center of the Tyumen region and Yamalo-Nenets, and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Districts (online), February 2020
“Environmental Subjectivities from the Soviet North,” at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University, December 2019
“Mystery-Solving in the Siberian Taiga: An Environmental History of Tunguska Investigations” at the Helsinki Environmental Humanities Forum, December 2019
“How Tunguska Became a Mystery?” at the History Office of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), March 2019
“The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History” at Pomona College, November 2018
“Alternative Logics of Soviet Science: Amateur Encounters with the Tunguska Explosion” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2018
“Environment and Power in the Soviet Arctic” at Reed College, March 2018
“Eurasianism in Soviet Science: The Environmental Views of Aleksandr Fersman” at History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Colloquium at the University of Minnesota, December 2017
“Environment and Power in the Soviet Arctic” at Middlebury College, September 2017
Seminar discussion of “The Nature of Soviet Power” at the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History of the Higher School of Economics at Saint Petersburg, Russia, May 2017
“Environment and Power in the Soviet Arctic” at the College of William and Mary, February 2017
“Environment, Power, and the Soviet Arctic” at the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, December 2015
“Northern Exposures: Living through and Reacting to Environmental Degradation in the Late Soviet Arctic” at Resistance, Protest and Criticism in the Name of Nature: USSR and Post-Soviet States, 1950-2010 in Moscow, Russia, October 2015
“Avalanches Disasters in the Soviet North” for the Geography Colloquium at Northern Illinois University, February 2015
“The Tunguska Explosion of 1908 and the Landscape of Siberia: Toward the Environmental History of an Enigmatic Disaster” at the University of Tübingen in Germany, June 2013
“How a Rock Remade the Soviet Environment: Conservation and Pollution in the Mining Industry of the Russian Arctic (Kola Peninsula), 1930s-1970s” at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France, May 2013
“Tumbling Snow in the Soviet Union: A History of Avalanches in the Khibiny Mountains, 1929-1991” at Northern Illinois University, April 2012
“Waste Not, Want Not: Reusable Rocks and Pollution in the Soviet North” at History and Philosophy of Science Program Brownbag Talk at Florida State University, October 2011
“Igniting Russia’s Northern Lights: The Natures of Twentieth-Century Economic Transformation in a Polar Region” at Noontime Scholar Lecture Series of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, January 2011
Workshops and Seminars
“Forms of Growth in Soviet Socialism: Reconsidering Productivism in Light of Scholarship on Degrowth” at Russian Ecospheres (second network meeting) in Munich, July 2023“Planetary Humanities” at Russian Ecospheres in Berlin, June 2022
“Landscape of Mystery” and “Life in Tunguska” (book chapters) at the anthropology reading group of the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg (online), April 2021
“Landscape of Mystery,” “Views from Afar,” and “Siberian and Planetary Futures” (draft book chapters) at the Russian studies reading group of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (online), April 2021
“Experiencing Climate in Russian History” at Climate Change in the Soviet Union and Russia: Approaches and Debates in Science, Society and Politics, 1960s-2010s in Moscow, April 2019
“Reaching the Inaccessible Terrain” at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in Evanston, IL, April 2019
“Solving a Mystery in the Siberian Taiga: The Environmental Logics of Tunguska Expeditions” at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2019
“Environmental Subjectivity in the Soviet Union” at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in Evanston, IL, March 2017
“The Life of Imandra: An Aqua-Biography of a Kola Lake” at Exploring Russia’s Environmental History and Natural Resources on Lake Baikal, Russia, July 2015
“Conservation and Industry in the Soviet North: A Reflection on the Trade-Offs between National and Transnational Environmental Histories” at Ekologicheskaia istoriia v Rossii: etapy stanovleniia i perspektivnye napravleniia issledovanii [Environmental History in Russia: Stages of Development & Promising Research Directions] in Elabuga, Russia, November 2014 (participated remotely)
“Nature and Power in the Soviet North” at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in Saint Paul, MN, October 2014
“The Mineralogical View: Alexander Fersman’s Conception of Eurasian Environment” at Conceptualising the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Russia, 18th-20th Centuries in Saint Petersburg, Russia, March 2013
“Tumbling Snow: Vulnerability to Avalanches in the Soviet North” at Frost, Snow and Ice: Cold Climate in Russian History in Moscow, Russia, February 2012
“Reusable Rocks and Soviet Pollution: The Case of Khibiny Nepheline” at Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Eurasian History at the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference in Columbus, OH, September 2011
“Militaristic Modernization and the Construction of the Murmansk Railroad” at the Summer Research and Writing Workshop on Historical Issues of Arctic Assimilation at Colby College in Waterville, ME, June 2011
“The Environmental History of Soviet Modernization (and the Eurasian Climate)” at Space and Circulation in Russian and Eurasian Studies, Summer Research Laboratory of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, June 2011
“An Environmental History of Energy in Northwest Russia” at Research and Policy Forum hosted by the Social Science Research Council on Resources in Eurasia: Energy, Power and Development in Washington DC, May 2010
“Contested Spaces: Reindeer in Russia” at [Un]natural Conversations: Advancing Environmental Scholarship Through Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue in Urbana, IL, April 2010
“Soviet Modernization and the Arctic Environment: A Case Study of a Stalinist Mining Town” (poster) at Planet U: The Human Story of Climate Change in Urbana, IL, April 2009
“Extracting the Stone of Fertility: Stalinism as an Ecosystem” at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in East Lansing, MI, April 2009
“Revolutionizing Reindeer: Soviet Modernization of an Animal in Northwest Russia” at Resursy, tekhnologiia, okruzhaiushhaia sreda: sostoianie i perspektivy razvitiia ekologicheskoi i tekhnologicheskoi istorii Rossii [Resources, Technology, and the Environment: The State and Possibilities for Development of the Environmental and Technological History of Russia] in Saint Petersburg, Russia, February 2008
“Soviet Uses and Representations of Reindeer: The Cooptation of a Saami Animal on the Kola Peninsula” at the “Other” Animals: Situating the Non-Human in Russian History and Culture in Roanoke, VA, May 2007
“The Concept of Backwardness in Russia’s Progressive Political Culture of the 1890s” at Studying Jews, Studying Europe in Urbana, IL, October 2005
“Images of Nature during the Industrialization of the Kola Peninsula” at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in Chicago, IL, October 2004
Chair, Commentator, and Roundtables
Roundtable participant on the session “A Grand Narrative for the Early Modern World: The Twentieth Anniversary of The Unending Frontier” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Boston, MA, March 2023
Chair for the session “Science, Exploration, and Rebellion” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Boston, MA, March 2023
Chair for the session “Evolution, Cosmology, and Empire” at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Chicago, IL, November 2022
Commentator for the session “Of Honeybees and Horses: Animals and Society in East European History” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Chicago, IL, November 2022
Commentator for the session “Feeding the East: Animals, Environment, and Famines in Modern Eastern Europe” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Eugene, OR, March 2022
Chair for the session “Transnational Transfers of Technologies in Late Socialist Eastern Europe: Infrastructural Cooperation and the Question of Socialist Justice” at the conference of the Society for the History of Technology (online), November 2021
Chair for the session “Water Resources in the Late Soviet Era: Regional Perspectives” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in New Orleans, LA, November 2021
Roundtable participant on the session “Voobrazhaemyi antropotsen: istoricheskoe znanie ob okruzhaiushchei srede i prirode Sibiri” [Imaginary Anthropocene: Historical Knowledge about the Environment and Nature of Siberia] at Sibirskii istoricheskii forum [Siberian Historical Forum] in Krasnoyarsk, Russia (online), September 2021
Roundtable participant on the session “Book discussion of Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast”at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC (online), November 2020
Chair for the session “Mass Scientific and Cultural Literacy in the USSR and Russia: 1940s–1990s” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC (online), November 2020
Roundtable participant on the session, “Anthropocene Now!” at summer school “Transcending Nature” at Tyumen State University (online), July 2020
Roundtable participant on the session “Between Center and Periphery: New Perspectives in Russian and Soviet History” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in San Francisco CA, November 2019
Roundtable participant on the session “Environmental History of Mining Part II: A Roundtable on the Risks and Rewards of Inter- national Environmental History of Mining” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Columbus, OH, April 2019
Commentator for the session “Politics through Landscape in European History” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Columbus, OH, April 2019
Roundtable participant on the session “Nuclear Pasts/Nuclear Futures II: Power” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston, MA, December 2018
Roundtable participant on the sessions “Living Urban in the Soviet Arctic” and “Teaching the Russian Environmental History” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Chicago, IL, November 2017
Chair for the sessions “Irrigation” and “Urban Waters” at the International Water History Association conference in Grand Rapids, MI, June 2017
Chair for the session “The Politics of Space and Technology on Modern Asian Rivers” at the conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Chicago, IL, March 2017
Chair for the session “Healing in Imperial and Early Soviet Russia” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Philadelphia, PA, November 2015
Commentator for the paper, “Guerilla Urbanism: Panzhihua and the Alternate Socialist Form of Late Maoist Urbanity” at the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop of the University of Chicago, May 2014
Roundtable participant on the session “Teaching the Russian Revolution in the Twenty-First Century” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston, MA, November 2013
Commentator for the session “The Seventh Republic: Exploration, Environment, and the Making of Soviet Tajikistan” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston, MA, November 2013
Chair for the session “Soviet Culture in the Stalin Era” at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in South Bend, IN, October 2012
Chair and commentator for the session “Authority and Production of Environmental Knowledge in Comparative Perspective, 1930-1960s” at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC, November 2011
Commentator for the session “Elements of Nature: Russia’s Resources in Historical Context” at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston, MA, November 2009
Chair for the session “Self-Creation and the Aesthetics of Identity in Russian-Jewish Literature” at Imagining Jewish Modernities in Urbana, IL, April 2005
MEDIA APPEARANCES
Radio interview on WINC’s Inquiry (November 2022)
Quoted in Santiago Florez, “Arctic Glaciers, a Peruvian Volcano, and a Russian Famine,” Eos (October 11, 2022)
Quoted in Tamlin Magee, “Bigfoot Believers Uncovered a Lost Manuscript About the ‘Soviet Sasquatch’,” Vice (September 7, 2022)
Interviewed about a conference at Tyumen State University on the Russian television station Tyumen Time (October 2021)
Interviewed by Andrei Vinogradov for “After Deadline” (October 2021)
Podcast interview with The Road to Now (March 16, 2020)
Interviewed about Tunguska on the Russian television stations NTV and Rossiia in Krasnoyarsk (June 2018)
Podcast interview with New Books in Environmental Studies (January 30, 2018)
Podcast interview on the SRB Podcast (August 26, 2016)
Quoted in Rebecca Leber, “Trump’s Other Russian Connection,” Mother Jones (June 9, 2017)
GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Great Journeys Graduate Assistantship Award, Northern Illinois University, 2022-2023
Russian Science Foundation (Project No 20-68-46044), “Imaginary Anthropocene: Environmental Knowledge Production and Transfers in Siberia in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” at the Center “Human, Environment & Technology,” Tyumen State University, 2020-2022
Fellowship in Aerospace History, History of Science Society and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 2018
Research and Artistry Facilitation Grant, Northern Illinois University, 2017-2018
Lillian Cobb Faculty Travel Fellowship for International Teaching and Service, Northern Illinois University, Summer 2015
Thomas M. Siebel Fellowship in the History of Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010-2011
Human Dimensions of Environmental Systems, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008-2009, 2009-2010
Social Science Research Council, International Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2007-2008
Foreign Language and Area Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004-2006
Fulbright, U.S. Student Fulbright Grant, 2003-2004
SERVICE AT NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History, Fall 2018-
Executive Committee, Environmental Studies, 2018-2023
Acting Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of History, Fall 2017
University Press Board, Northern Illinois University Press, 2017-2026
Graduate Committee, Department of History, 2016-2017, 2018-
Lecture/Colloquium Committee, Department of History, 2015-2021
Undergraduate Committee, Department of History, 2013-2016
Library Liasson, Department of History, 2021-2022
Brown Bag Coordinator, Department of History, 2013-2014, 2022-2023
Assessment and Program Review Task Force, Department of History, 2012-2013
EXTERNAL SERVICE
Editorial Board for the Journal of Modern History, 2023-2025
Editorial Board for the book series, “East European and Eurasian Ecologies: Past, Present, and Future” at Academic Studies Press, 2023-
Editorial Board for The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 2015-
W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Committee for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2022-2024
Faculty Mentor for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, (Nadezhda Filimonova) and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (Mirjam Voerkelius)
Article Peer Reviewer for American Historical Review; Slavic Review; Environmental History; Cahiers du Monde russe; Environment and History; Agricultural History; Geoforum; Theory, Culture and Critique; Kritika; The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review; Climate Change; WIREs Climate Change; Cold War History; Sibirica; Europe-Asian Studies; Extractive Industries and Society; Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient; Ab Imperio; Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society;Studia Historiae Scientiarum, International Labor and Working-Class History; Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History; Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine; Journal of Contemporary History; REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia; The Arctic Institute; and Polar Record
Book Peer Reviewer for University of Pittsburgh Press, Northern Illinois University Press, Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury Publishing, Berghahn Books, Palgrave, MIT Press, and I. B. Tauris
Book Endorserfor Oxford University Press, Northern Illinois University Press, and I. B. Tauris
Tenure and Promotion Reviewer for Colgate University
Grant and Fellowship Reviewer for the American Academy in Berlin, Swiss National Science Foundation, German Research Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Social Science Research Council
COURSES TAUGHT
Senior Thesis
Historical Methods
Graduate Readings Seminar: Climate History
Graduate Readings Seminar: Disasters
Graduate Research Seminar: Environmental History
Seminar in College Teaching of History
Global Climate History
World History since 1500
Stalinism
The Russian Revolution
Russia to 1861
Soviet Union and Beyond
Russian Empire
Medieval Russia
Environment in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Environmental Histories of the Communist World
Europe since 1939
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Jonathan Adsit, Northern Illinois University (PhD advisor)
Alexander Craver, Northern Illinois University (PhD advisor)
Alexander Sosenko, Northern Illinois University (PhD advisor)
Mariia Koskina, Binghamton University (PhD dissertation committee member, 2023)
Dmitry Arzyutov, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (PhD dissertation seminar opponent/committee alternate, 2021)
Ekaterina Kalemeneva, Higher School of Economics (Dissertation Council, Candidate of Sciences, 2019)
Aibubi Duisebayeva, Al- Farabi Kazakh National University (PhD dissertation committee member, 2023)
Roman Bugaev, European University at Saint Petersburg (MA thesis external reviewer, 2023)
Aleksandr Korobeinikov, Central European University (complex exam committee, 2021)
Zachary Killebrew, Northern Illinois University (Dean’s Designee, 2020)
Marc Hoffman, Northern Illinois University (MA committee member)
OTHER AFFILIATIONS
Affiliate of the Research Center “Human, Nature, and Technology” at Tyumen State University, 2020-2022
Community Associate of the Center for Culture, History and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015-
Off-campus Program Associate of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015-
Associate Memberof the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago, 2013-
Regional Faculty Associateof the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013-
Affiliate, Center for Environmental and Technological History at the European University at Saint Petersburg, 2003-2004, 2007-2008
PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
American Historical Association
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
American Society for Environmental History
History of Science Society