Faculty

Research Overview

Interests: Russia; Soviet Union; Central Asia; the Alps; the Pamirs; History of Mountaineering; Modern European History; Gender; Masculinity; Science; Environmental History; History of Glaciers; Animal Studies; Ice Humanities; Cold Studies

I am a historian of modern Europe whose research focuses increasingly on the intersections of gender, environment, science, and political power. My first book, Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), received the 2018 Harry C. Koenig Book Award from the American Catholic Historical Association. Since its publication, my work has moved toward environmental history and the environmental humanities, with particular interests in masculinity, ecofeminism, gender and science, and the ways political and social relationships are constituted through encounters with the natural world.

I am currently completing The Politburo Goes Hunting: Masculinity, Nature, and Power in the Soviet Union (Cornell University Press), which examines hunting as a political, social, and environmental practice through which Soviet elites constructed masculine identities, cultivated personal networks, and exercised power over both people and landscapes.

My more recent work turns to the emerging field of ice humanities and to the history of scientific encounters with cold environments. I am currently developing two collaborative projects in this area. The first, undertaken with an international group of scholars associated with the Swiss PAMIR Project and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is an eco-biography of the Fedchenko Glacier in Tajikistan. Bringing together environmental history, geography, and the history of science, the project traces the glacier as a changing body of ice, a landscape, a scientific object, and an archive of climatic and political change (under contract, White Horse Press). The second, with Professor Stewart Weaver (University of Rochester, History), explores the early history of glacial science and scientific mountaineering in the Alps and Central Asia.

I also serve as a consultant to the Swiss National Science Foundation project Myth of Equality: The Gendered History of Science in Central Asia (1870–1970), led by Katja Doose and Christine Bichsel at the University of Fribourg. The project examines how gender shaped scientific institutions, fieldwork, and knowledge production in Russian and Soviet Central Asia. https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/223625

Together with Stewart Weaver, I have also served as an international collaborator with the History of Glacier Science cluster of the PAMIR Project, a flagship initiative of the Swiss Polar Institute bringing together historians, geographers, and scientists to study the changing cryosphere of the Pamir Mountains. https://pamir-project.ch/research/history-of-glacier-science/ 

My interest in ice and cold environments also extends to community relationships with glaciers. As a recipient of a 2016 University of Rochester Research Award, I helped develop an oral-history project in Ladakh, India, examining how local communities understand and respond to changing glaciers and water landscapes. Taken together, these projects explore how cold environments have been experienced, studied, represented, and transformed—and how relationships with ice and landscape illuminate broader histories of science, gender, politics, and environmental change.

I am also a co-editor of the “Humanities in the World Series”, University of Rochester Press https://www.sas.rochester.edu/humanities/programs/humanities-in-the-world.html and serve as Director of the Cold and Northern Studies Lab at the University of Rochester, an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together scholars working on cold environments, northern regions, and the cultural, historical, and political meanings of ice and cold. The Lab works in close collaboration with colleagues at the University of Turku in Finland, creating an international forum for research and exchange across the humanities and related fields. https://www.sas.rochester.edu/humanities/programs/cold-studies-lab.html

Graduate Research Fields

I am not accepting new graduate student advisees for our MA and PhD programs.

Courses Offered (subject to change)

• HIST 100:  The Case of Sherlock Holmes: Race, Gender, and Crime in the British Empire
• GSWS 105:  Sex and Power
• HIST 132:  Imperial Russia
• HIST 133:  USSR and Post-Soviet Russia
• GSWS 200/W:  History of Feminism/Colloquium in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
• HIST 200:  History of Masculinity
• HIST 256:  Politics of Nature: Race, Gender, and the Environment

Selected Publication Covers

Selected Publications

• “How Women Got the Vote,” Reviews in American History 44, no. 2 (2016): 291 - 298. 
• Including Students in Academic Conversations:  Principles and Strategies for Teaching Theme-Based Writing Courses across the Disciplines (with Deborah Rossen-Knill) (Hampton Press, 2011) 
• “Education in the United States” in American society: Essays on history and culture (St. Petersburg: University of St. Petersburg, 2008) 
• “Russian Catholicism and the Collapse of the Ideals of the Enlightenment,” Nauka, Religiia i Obstchetvo: Sbornik Statei 36 (2006): 84 – 99.  
• “Russian Catholicism in the First Quarter of 19th Century: New Look,” Religiovedenie (Study of Religion) 4 (2005): 30 – 41.

Awards

• Ferrari Humanities Research Award, University of Rochester
• 2024: Alfred Sloan Foundation Grant
• 2024: Fellow, Das Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO), Leipzig, Germany
• 2024: Collaborator – Swiss National Science Foundation Grant
• 2023: NEH Planning International Collaboration Grant
• 2022: University of Rochester Pump Primer research grant
• 2021: Public Outreach Award, American Society for Environmental History
• 2020: Goergen Teaching Award, University of Rochester
• 2018: Harry Koenig Book Award, American Catholic Historical Association
• 2016: University of Rochester Research Award