BIOGRAPHY

The questions that underpin my teaching and research lie at the intersection of the environment, science & technology, and empire. In the broadest sense, I am interested in understanding how attempts to control, exploit, and reshape the environment (including humans) are also shaped by political, cultural, and social aims. In particular, my research seeks to explain what happens when such plans do not work out exactly the way their authors had hoped and why. Nevertheless, I understand that these failures should be held in tension with the reality that such projects did remake the environment and peoples, simply not in the ways their creators had wished, and their afterlives are still with us today. In the Russian and Soviet cases, where my work is centered, I focus on explaining how the vagaries of the environment, the complexity of the aims, and the resistance of human and animal subjects often thwarted the goals of the powerful. Finally, while my research is focused in Russian and Soviet Central Asia, I draw on other similar experiences elsewhere and make connections between this region and the rest of the world to bring a global and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environment, science, technology, and settler colonialism.

In my current book project, tentatively entitled, “Unsettled Science: Agronomists, Nomads, and the Kazakh Steppe Settler Colony, 1881-1917” I center these broad questions on the case of science and agronomy in the Russian settler colonial project on the Kazakh Steppe at the turn of the twentieth century. This work explores how agricultural science was central to Russia’s colonial project, as imperial authorities sought to change the region from one that was dominated by nomads and pastoralism into a zone of sedentary peasant farmers. While fundamentally agricultural in nature, the undertaking extended beyond crops and animals and transformed the environment, society, and economy of the region in ways that had far reaching consequences. Today Kazakhstan is among the world’s top grain producing regions, which is a direct legacy of the strategies, research, and infrastructures developed by imperial administrators, settlers, and scientists.

For my next book-length archival project, I have begun work on a topic that I tentatively call “Soviet Power: Energy and the Making of Modern Kazakhstan.” This second book will explore the previously under-discussed role of the Kazakh SSR as an energy producing giant especially in its reserves and production of coal, oil, gas, and uranium. My research will explore how these various energies played a fundamental role in the creation of the modern nation, albeit one mediated by the environmental and technological particularities of different energy sources. Additionally, I will explore its ambiguous relationship as a kind of resource colony for Moscow. In particular, I will examine how various technopolitical regimes of energy production changed and shaped individual identities as well as the nation in terms of economics, politics, the environment, and culture. In addition to the crucial role energy played in constructing Soviet Kazakhstan (and still plays today), this project is explicitly global in its approach as it seeks to place the development of energy industries in Soviet Kazakhstan in a broader Soviet and Cold War story.

My research has been supported by various fellowships including: Fulbright, the American Councils of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation (ACLS/Mellon) Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and the Association for Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship. However, I believe my research is complimentary to my teaching, for which I have received all three teaching awards during my time at Tennessee Wesleyan. When I am not digging around Central Asian archives or teaching my wonderful students at TWU, I can be found taking our students on study away trips to places like the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, or the Carolina Lowcountry to explore and understand history and the environment firsthand. My own experiences studying and living in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russia, Cuba, and Kazakhstan were transformational in my life and I try to do my part to make sure it is an opportunity available to TWU students as well. I also serve as the advisor to the Outdoor Club.

Away from campus, I live on a small farm in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains where my wife and I raise a large garden and keep a small orchard and flock of chickens with our border collie, Conwy who can sometimes be found visiting campus. As a transplant to East Tennessee, my own struggles (and successes) raising plants in a strange and new environment has in many ways shaped my own thinking about the environment, agriculture, and knowledge in delightfully tangible and intangible ways.