Academic interests
I am an environmental and medical historian of Modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with a geographical research focus on the "subtropical" south and the Black Sea, in transnational and international context. My research often explores the "shared ground" between the history science and environmental history, tracing how environments shaped human knowledge and how human knowledge in turn shaped environments, with an emphasis on the role of medicine in knowing and making environments, or what I call in my first book (see below), "environing medicine." I am especially interested in intersections between environment and health, nature protection, urban planning, and maritime environments.
My first book, Therapeutic Natures: Environment and Health in the Soviet Sanatorium (just published by Cornell University Press in 2026), is a history of the Soviet sanatorium in the Early Soviet and Stalinist periods. It examines how medical research produced environmental knowledge in the past, and how this environmental knowledge shaped the medical practice, architecture, urban planning, and landscapes of the sanatorium and the rise of ecological self-understanding and consciousness in society. This study applies theoretical frameworks developed in the “post-Pasteurian” turn in environmental humanities, emphasizing the interconnection of the human body and the environment and between textual, material, and embodied knowledges and experiences. I argue that the rise of bacteriology did not lead to a paradigm shift away from the environmental dimensions of disease in Soviet medicine, as occurred in other contexts within scientific medicine particularly after the discovery of antibiotics. A distinctly socialist form of natural healing developed in the Soviet Union, which had its origins in Central European natural healing practices and international socialist politics. The Soviet approach to medicine was not backward, but rather constituted a socialist variant within the shared experience of scientific medicine in the twentieth century.
Currently, I am editing a book on Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasian History, drawing on contributions to a workshop that I convened at the University of Oslo, June 1-2, 2023, Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia: New Perspectives in the Medical-Environmental Humanities and History, generously supported by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, UiO: Life Sciences, and KLIMER: Interdisciplinær forskergruppe for klima, miljø, og energi.
From 2024-2026 I led a research group, the Multispecies Landscapes Lab, at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation, and History, a sub-project of the Oslo Center of Environmental Humanities. In 2026, I organized a workshop on Rethinking Domestic Interiors. In 2025, I organized a workshop on Probiotic Ecologies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Both are tied to ongoing projects.
I am the curator of a forum on 'The Black Sea World and the Question of Boundaries', published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies, drawing on a workshop that I convened on 'The Black Sea in the Socialist World' at Birkbeck in 2015.
Background
I have a PhD and MA in History from Harvard University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Before coming to Oslo, I was a Lecturer in International and European History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and a post-doctoral research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Fellowships
2022-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers
2020-2021 Fellow, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany
2019 Title VIII Summer Research Scholar, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC
2017 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in the Laureate Research Program in International History, The University of Sydney
2013-2014 Dumbarton Oaks Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2011-2012 Foreign Language and Area Studies Research Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education)
Grants
2026 UiO: Energy and Environment International Mobility and Collaboration Grant, University of Oslo
2022 UiO: Life Sciences Conference Grant, University of Oslo
2015 Wellcome Trust Small Grant in the Medical Humanities
2015 Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Conference Organisation Grant
2015 Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference Organisation Grant
2015 British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Conference Organisation Grant
2010-2011 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award (U.S. Department of State)
Publications
Books
- Therapeutic Natures: Environment and Health in the Soviet Sanatorium (Cornell University Press, Russian and Eurasian Studies Series, in press).
- Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasian History (edited book in progress).
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
- “Chronic Cures: The Sanatorium Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease Patients in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (in press).
- “Controlling Land, Controlling People: Urban Greening and the Territorial Turn in Theories of Urban Planning in the Soviet Union, 1931–1932.” Journal of Urban History 48, no. 3 (May 2022): 479–503.
- “Curative Nature: Medical Foundations of Soviet Nature Protection, 1917–1941.” Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 23–49.
- “‘Our Black Sea Coast’: The Sovietization of the Black Sea Littoral under Khrushchev and the Problem of Overdevelopment.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 327–361.
- “Places of Plenty: Patient Perspectives on Nutrition and Health in the Health Resorts of the USSR, 1917–1953.” Food & History 14, no. 1 (2016): 113–140.
- “Beyond Liberal Internationalism.” Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (May 2016): 359–371. With Ana Antic and Dora Vargha.
- “Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1928–1936.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 91–120.'
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters
- “Illuminating Microbes: The Prevention of Infectious Diseases with Bactericidal Lamps in Soviet Medicine, 1917-1953,” in Claire Shaw and Anna Toropova, eds., Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2023), 157-175.
- “Heating the Groves: Imported Technology, Transnational Scientific Networks and the Acclimatization of Citrus in the USSR, 1928-1941,” in Objects in Motion: Globalizing Technology, ed. Bryan Dewalt and Nina Möllers (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2016), 22-34.