Employment Dean’s Associate Professor of History & Environment and Society Brown University 2022-present
Assistant Professor of History & Environment and Society
Brown University 2016-2021
Education
PhD University of California, Berkeley, History, 2016 MA University of California, Berkeley, History, 2011 MA Brown University, International Development, 2007 BA Brown University, Trauma Studies (honors), 2006
Photo by Marlena Sloss
Books, Chapters and Articles
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, W.W. Norton, 2019, paperback 2020
2021 John H. Dunning Prize in American History, American Historical Association 2020 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book, American Society for Environmental History 2020 Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics 2020 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western Historical Association 2020 W. Turrentine Jackson Award, Western Historical Association 2020 Alaskana Award, Alaska Library Association 2020 William Mills Prize for Polar Non-fiction 2019 Julia Ward Howe Nonfiction Prize 2023 Prix Fondation Martine Aublet Longlist (French Translation) 2024 Prix des Gens de mer Shortlist (French Translation) 2020 Pushkin House Prize Finalist 2020 Cundill History Prize Longlist 2020 Rachel Carson Book Prize Honorable Mention, Society for Environmental Journalists Translated into Classical Chinese (Taiwan), Chinese, French, and Russian (in process)
Rivers on the Move, volume editor, with Mark Healey, Giacomo Parrinello, and Laurence Smith
“‘Terraqueous Connections:’ How the Sea Comes Ashore,” short framing essay forthcoming in Oceanic Japan, eds. Nadin Heé, Stefan Huebner, Ian J. Miller, and Bill Tsutsui, University of Hawaii Press 2024
“On the Agency of Environmental History,” The Journal of Social History, December 2023
“Against the Tide: The Trump Administration and Climate Change,” in The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University Press, 2022
“Whale Country: Bowheads of the Bering Strait and Their Hunters in the Nineteenth Century,” chapter in Across Species and Cultures: New Histories of Pacific Whaling, eds. Ryan Tucker Jones and Angela Wanhalla, University of Hawaii Press, 2022
“Labors of Love: People, Dogs, and Affect in North American Arctic Borderlands, 1700-1900,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 108 No. 2 (September 2021): 270–295
“The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic, 1870- 1950,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 124, No. 2 (April 2019): 483–510 2020 Theodore C. Blegen Award for Best Scholarship in Forest and Conservation History, Forest History Society 2020 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Award for Best Article in Any Field 2020 Stuart Bernath Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 2021 St. Andrews Prize from the European Society for Environmental History
"Grounding Capitalism: Geology, Labor, and the Nome Gold Rush," chapter in A Global History of the Gold Rushes, eds. Stephen Tuffnell and Benjamin Mountford, University of California Press, 2018
“More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in Chukotka and Alaska,” chapter in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, eds. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, University of British Columbia Press, 2013
“Law on the Land: Contesting Ethical Authority in the Western Arctic,” Ethnohistory, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2013): 469-483
Reviews
“A Lot of Hot Air,” Times Literary Supplement, February 2022
“Mothering in Bad Weather,” with Peggy O’Donnell, Orion Magazine, Spring 2021
Review of Yuri Rytkheu’s When the Whales Leave, Orion Magazine, Fall 2020
“Traveling Around and Into the Globe” The Chicago Review of Books, June 2019
“The Monster Within: Two New Books about Chernobyl” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2019
"Soviet Environment, Capitalist World," review of Andy Bruno's The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History in Kritika, Vol. 19 No. 1, Winter 2018
"Men, Ice, and Failure: New Histories of Arctic Exploration," lead essay in Reviews in American History, Vol. 45 No. 4, December 2017
Review of The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs by Joshua Reid, H-Environment Roundtable Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, July 2017
Review of The Russian Conquest of the Arctic, by Paul Josephson, H-Net Reviews, July 2016
Review of Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867, by Ryan Tucker Jones, The Journal of Pacific History, June 2015
Review of Chelovek i priroda na ob'-Irtyshskom severe 1917-1930 [People and Nature in the
Northern Ob-Irtysh 1917-1930] by E.I. Gololobov in Environment and History, Vol. 20, No. 4 (November 2015): 638-640.
“This Arctic Life: Review of ‘The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901-1977,’” H-Net Reviews, April 2013
Other Writing
Recent non-academic publications can be found here.
“Harvesting Light: New England Whaling in the Nineteenth Century,” teaching module for Yale Energy History
“Statehood and Other Events: Whales, Alaska Natives, and Perspectives on History,” post for Process: A Blog for American History
“More Voices, New Sources: Using Historical Documents to Diversify a Survey Syllabus,” post for Environmental History Now
“What Made the Thule Move? Climate and Culture in the High Arctic,” post for Historical Climatology
Contributing Author for the Chukotka section of the Arctic Council’s Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic
Fellowships & Grants
2020-24 Andrew Carnegie Fellow 2019 Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship 2019 Cogut Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship 2018 Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award 2017 Institute at Brown for Environment and Society Seed Grant 2015 Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship 2014 Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley Reinhardt Bendix Memorial Fellowship 2013 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, Russia 2012 US Student Fulbright, Russia (declined) 2012 IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship, Russia (declined) 2012 American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Fellowship, Russia (declined) 2010 Jacob J. Javits Fellowship 2010 Critical Language Fellowship for Russian, U.S. State Department 2010 Academic Year FLAS for Russian (declined) 2009 Academic Year FLAS for Russian 2009 Joe Lurie Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley 2006 Pembroke Center Undergraduate Fellowship, Brown University
Awards & Residencies
2023 Inducted Member, Society of American Historians 2022 Bureau of Land Management Dalton Highway Artist in Residence 2017 U.C. Berkeley Friends of Cal Award for Best Dissertation in History 2012 Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies National Graduate Student Essay Prize 2012 U.C. Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award
2010 Guervich Prize in Russian History, University of California, Berkeley
2005 Preston Gurney Prize in Literary Criticism, Brown University
Selected Conference Presentations
2024 “Environmental Studies, Anthropology, and Social Sciences,” panel at the Global History of Indigenous Thought conference, Yale University
2024 “Climate Change and Business History: New Directions in a Time of Environmental Challenges,” roundtable at the Business History Conference
2024 “Beyond Moby Dick and Save the Whales: Emerging Currents in Whale History, roundtable at the American Society for Environmental History
2023 “Environmental Histories Beyond the Academy,” roundtable at the American Society for Environmental History
2022 “Placing Histories of Energy,” roundtable discussion at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Environmental History Week
2021 “Environmental History and Environmental Humanities,” panel for the American Society for Environmental History Environmental History Week
2021 “Oceanic Worlds,” roundtable at the American Historical Association
2021 “The Challenges of Climate History: A Roundtable Discussion,” American Historical Association
2020 “Floating Coast book panel,” American Society for East European and Eurasian Studies Conference (virtual)
2020 “New Directions in Borderlands Studies,” roundtable Western History Association
2020 “Reflections on Degrowth,” 7th International Degrowth / 16th International Society for Ecological Economics Joint Conference (virtual)
2020 “Riparian Materialities: Emerging Approaches to Rivers in Environmental History,” panel organized and accepted for the COVID-canceled Ottawa meeting of the American Society of Environmental History
2020 “Forensic History: New Material Sources and Methods for Historians of the Anthropocene,” panel presentation at the American Historical Association conference in New York City
2019 “Writing North Pacific History Through its Ecosystems: Russia, the United States, and Trophic Change,” at Ocean, Island Shore: Placing the Global Pacific in the Age of Climate Change, Harvard University Center for the Environment
2019 “Trophic Interventions: Examining How Energy History Might Think with Ecosystems, Yale Energy Humanities Workshop
2019 “The Scorn of the President (and the Present): Teaching and Writing Politicized Histories in the Age of Trump,” American Historical Association, Chicago
2018 “Transnational Approaches to Soviet History,” American Society for East European and Eurasian Studies, Boston
2018 "'Whales, Few and Wild': Bowheads and the Role of the Nonhuman in Early North Pacific Capitalism," Crossing Species and Cultures: New Histories of Pacific Whaling, University of Hawaii at Mānoa
2018 "Whales, Whalers, and Thinking the Ocean through Cetacean Labor," Earth(ly) Matters: New Directions in the Environmental Humanities, Brown University
2018 "Soviet Whaling in the Russian Far East: Making Socialist Utopia at Sea 1930s-1970s," German Historical Institute Conference on the Russian Far East, Moscow
2018 "Harvesting Light: Whaling as Energy Production," round-table presentation on teaching energy history, American Society for Environmental History, Riverside CA
2017 "The Geology of Capitalism: Materiality in the Nome Gold Rush, 1898-1905," Sovereignty, Economy and the Global Histories of Natural Resources, Magdalene College, Cambridge UK
2017 "From Local Practice to Transnational Conservation: Yupik and Chukchi Influence on Marine Mammal Policy, 1900-1960," American Society for East European and Eurasian Studies, Chicago
2017 "Future Directions in Energy History," European Society for Environmental History, Zagreb, Croatia
2017 "The Place of Arctic Animals," panel at the Ninth International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS IX) in Umea, Sweden
2017 “Call of the Domestic: Huskies, Prospectors, and Inupiat in the Nome Gold Rush,” American Society for Environmental History, Chicago
2016 "The Unruly Walrus: Sea Mammals, Hunting, and Spatial Politics along the Bering Strait," the American Society for Ethnohistory, Nashville
2016 “From Limitless to Precious: Conservation in Capitalist and Communist Oceans,” the American Society for Environmental History, Seattle
2015 “The Energy of Borders: Ecology, Walrus Hunting, and Sovereignty at the Bering Straits,” the History of Energy and the Environment conference, Harvard
2015 “Transnational Animals and Local Empires: Russian Sealing in the North Pacific,” the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Philadelphia
2015 “Emptying the North Pacific: Conceptions of Whales as a Non-Renewable Resource,” the American Society for Environmental History in Washington, D.C.
2014 “Ice in the Machine: Ecology and Ideology in Chukchi Collectives,” the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, San Antonio, Texas
2014 “Soviet Development and the Arctic Environment in Chukotka,” the German Historical Institute “The Soviet Arctic,” Moscow
2013 “Levels of Adaptation: Humans and Fur Seals as Actors in North Pacific Globalization,” Berkeley International and Global History Conference, U.C. Berkeley
2012 “James Scott’s High Modernism and Soviet History: Still a Useful Approach?” the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, New Orleans
2012 “More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in the Bering Straits,” European Society for Environmental History Summer School, St. Petersburg, Russia
2012 “Composing the Fur Seal: Globalization and Human Adaptation in the North Pacific,” the American Society for Environmental History conference, Madison
2011 “Laws of the Land: Gwitchin Understandings of Place in the Era of Land Claims,” the Seventh International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS VII), Akureyri, Iceland
2010 “Isolation vs. Integration: Negotiating with the State in the Western Arctic,” the American Society for Ethnohistory conference, Ottawa
Teaching
Interests: Environmental History, Borderlands History, Pacific History, Marine History, History of Capitalism, Russian and Soviet History, United States History, Environmental Humanities, Environmental/Science Writing
Summer 2023 The Yukon River, a week-long intensive field environmental history course taught while canoeing between Eagle and Circle Alaska.
Fall 2023 Thinking with the Elements: Environmental Theories and Praxis, upper-level seminar, co-taught with Macarena Gomez-Barris
Spring 2023, Fall 2023 Narrating the Anthropocene, senior seminar on environmental writing and communication, co-taught with Elizabeth Rush
Fall 2023 Energy and Power: An Environmental History of North America, introductory-level lecture
Spring 2019 From the Dog Sled to the Oil Rig: Arctic Environmental History, first-year seminar
Fall 2018 Powering the Past: Environmental Histories of Energy Use and Social Change, upper-level lecture
Fall 2017, Spring 2023 Readings in Environmental History, graduate field seminar
Fall 2020 Environmental Humanities, graduate seminar
Spring 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 From the Colombian Exchange to Climate Change: Human Impacts on the Global Environment Since 1492, introductory-level lecture
Fall 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2020 The Anthropocene: The Past and Present of Environmental Change, upper-division writing-intensive seminar for Environmental Studies majors
Fall 2016 Powering the Past: Energy History, junior-senior seminar
Invited Talks & Presentations
Up-to-date event listings can be found here
2019 “The Value of Blubber: Soviet Whaling and the Cold War,” Elihu Rose Lectures in Modern Military History at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University
2019 “In the Shelter of the Ice: Bowhead Whales and Human Uses of Sea Ice,” University of Victoria IdeaFest 2019
2019 “The Ethical Lives of Whales: Bowhead Hunts and Adaptations in the Bering Strait, 1848-1968,” Biennial Whaling History Symposium, New Bedford Whaling Museum
2018 “Making the Ideological Reindeer: Ecology and Ideology in the Bering Strait, 1840s-1980s,” University of Indiana Russian and East European Institute
2018 "Where Ideology and Ecology Meet: Telling Russian and American Environmental History at the Bering Strait, 1840-1980,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History
2018 “Caloric Values,” presented at the University of Michigan Russian Studies Kruzhok
2018 “What is a Whale: Economics, Entropy, and Cosmologies of the Nonhuman” Unnatural Disasters Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
2018 "Old Energy Stories from the Western Arctic," Georgetown University
2017 "Species of Transition: People, Dogs, and the Making of Hybrid Borderlands in Gold Rush Alaska," O. Meredith Wilson Symposium, University of Utah
2017 "Where Ideology and Ecology Meet: Telling Russian and American Environmental History at the Bering Strait," Brandeis University Russian History Kruzhok
2017 "Species of Transition: People, Dogs, and the Making of Hybrid Spaces in Gold Rush Alaska," The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University
2016 "Agency Sits in Places: Ecology and Ideology in the Bering Strait, 1840s-1980s," colloquium at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University
2016 "Arctic Powers: How Ecology Shaped Ideas in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988," Institute at Brown for Environment and Society
2016 "Agency Sits in Places: Ecology and Ideology in the Bering Strait, 1840s-1980s," colloquium at the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
Service and Leadership
2023-present Editorial Board, Environmental History
2022-present Advisory Board, Alaska History
2022-present Co-director, The Environmental Storytelling Studio
2021-present Steering Committee, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
2018-present Founding Member & Steering Committee, Environmental Humanities at Brown
2018-2019 Faculty Fellow at the Haffenreffer Museum, Brown University
2017-2019 Joukowsky Institute Fellow, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown
2014-2019 Assistant Director of Historical Climatology and the Climate History Network
2016-2018 Member, John Carter Brown Library Academic Advisory Committee, Brown
2015-2016 Developed grade and high school curriculum materials on the environmental history of the Dust Bowl in the American West with the Berkeley History-Social Science Project
2014-2016 Co-founder of Berkeley’s Environmental Science & History working group, including organizing bi- monthly meetings, managing grant budget
2013-2014 Graduate Student Liaison for the American Society for Environmental History, projects included leading the Graduate Student Caucus, launching a new mentoring program, increasing graduate student involvement, creating a social media presence
2010-2011 Co-managed the Berkeley Russian History Kruzhok, including writing small grants, overseeing the budget, and arranged presentations by Berkeley and visiting academics
2009-2015 Founding member of the Berkeley International and Global History group and lead organizer of the third bi-annual conference
Related Experience
2014-2015 Wrote general-audience reviews of environmentally focused social science projects for the Berkeley Social Science Matrix
2007-2009 United States Peace Corps Volunteer, Republic of Moldova; worked with victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, developed grants and materials in Romanian and Russian, helped establish the first local therapy program for abusers
2006-2007 Resident Graduate Adviser, Brown University, mentored undergraduate peer counselors and organized academic and social activities for a dorm of 500 students
Summer 2006 Analyst at the Carter Center, wrote briefings on events in the Middle East
Summer 2004 French and English-language research for Carolyn Dean, Brown University
1999-2002 Worked with local Salmon Fisheries and Porcupine Caribou Management Board member in Old Crow, Yukon; participated in all aspects of seasonal subsistence actives, including salmon harvest, hunting, long-distance dog sledding
Languages
Russian, Romanian, French (reading)