Northern Illinois University
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Current Research

I am 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 history. This goal has led me to write about animals and avalanches, energy and economy, revolution and repression, waste and water, science and socialism, and other themes. In this scholarship, I have highlighted the role of nature as an actor in history and the place of the Russian environmental experience in comparative and global history. A focus on specific locations—the Russian Arctic and the Siberian taiga, for instance—has also characterized my approach to environmental history. My first book examines the environmental history of economic transformation in the Russian north during the twentieth century and my second book explores the history of the 1908 Tunguska explosion and the efforts to understand it. I am in the process of starting two new 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. See my personal website for more information.

Major Publications

Book

• Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Articles/Book Chapters

• "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.
• "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.
• "Environmental Subjectivities from the Soviet North," Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-22.
• "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.
• "Climate History of Russia and the Soviet Union," WIREs Climate Change (July 2018), doi: 10.1002/wcc.534.
• "What Does it Mean to Liberate a Land? Toward an Environmental History of the Russian Revolution," in Christopher Read, and Peter Waldron, Adele Lindenmeyr, eds., Russia's Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22, Book 3: National Disintegration (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2018), 157-177.
• "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 (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.
• "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.
• "Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 635-650.

Teaching Interests

I teach a full array of courses on Russian history as well as classes on comparative environmental history, including climate history. I also offer surveys on world history and European history and methodological/thematic courses for history majors, advanced undergraduates, and graduate students.

Courses Taught

• HIST 171: World History since 1500
• HIST 336: Russia to 1861
• HIST 337: Russia since 1861
• HIST 389/ENVS 450: Global Climate History
• HIST 395: Historical Methods
• HIST 434/534: Russian Revolution
• HIST 435/535: Stalinism
• HIST 495: Senior Thesis
• HIST 600: Graduate Reading Seminar on Climate History
• HIST 600: Graduate Reading Seminar on Natural Disasters
• HIST 695: Seminar in College Teaching of History

Interdisciplinary Affiliation

Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Personal Webpage