Our Russian partners win prestigious grant from the Russian Science Foundation!

A team of researchers led by Professor Julia Lajus of the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg (HSE Spb), has been awarded a large grant for their project entitled:

Natural Resources in the History of Russia: Economic Institutes, Communities of Experts, and Infrastructures 

The full team is: Julia Lajus, Alexandra Bekasova, Marina Loskutova, Margarita Dadykina, Elena Korchmina, Elena Kochetkova and PhD students Ekaterina Kalemeneva and Vassily Borovoy (HSE Spb); Andrei Volodin (Moscow State University); Alexei Kraikovski  (European University at St Petersburg); Anastasia Fedotova (Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg). 

The project will make a significant contribution to the growing international scholarship in environmental history from a European as well as a global perspective. The environmental history of Russia will be analysed within an interdisciplinary framework incorporating a range of fields from across the humanities and social sciences. The project involves analysis of economic institutions, the activities of the expert community, and the development of infrastructures. The project comprises individual case studies of s , formed by major chronological periods , and the focus will be on lesser known historically significant natural resources (forests , water, fisheries , minerals ) over the period from the seventeenth century to the end of the Cold War in the late twentieth century.

The new knowledge obtained as a result of joint work of researchers specializing in the field of economic, environmental and technological history, will significantly improve the understanding of the interaction of people and nature in the past and will be useful in the development of informed decisions in the field of environmental management in the present.

The project is a very good example of what can be termed the ‘usable past’ i.e. knowledge and understanding of the past which has a practical relevance for addressing contemporary problems.

For the announcement on the website of the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg (in Russian), please see: https://spb.hse.ru/news/179560031.html

For more details (in English) please see: http://russianenvironmentalhistory.blogspot.co.uk/p/blog-page_17.html

Network poster

A poster providing information about the Network is now available to download from the website at http://www.york.ac.uk/history/research/majorprojects/russiasenvironmentalhistory/#tab-7 under the subheading "Network Publicity"

International Network Established

We are delighted to announce that The Leverhulme Trust has awarded an International Network Grant to the University of York for a project led by Professor David Moon entitled :

Exploring Russia’s Environmental History and Natural Resources

The network will comprise specialists from York and Glasgow universities in the UK, Georgetown and Ohio State universities in the USA, and the European University and Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg, Russia.

The network’s activities will revolve around a series of annual workshops/field trips to specific locations: the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea; the Chernobyl’ exclusion zone in Ukraine; and Lake Baikal in Siberia. The project will combine field work in these locations with conventional historical research in order to enhance our understanding of the history of Russian scientific research, exploitation of natural resources, environmental disasters, and nature conservation.

By adding field work to conventional historical research we will enhance our understanding of the history of Russian scientific research, exploitation of natural resources, environmental disasters, and nature conservation.

The network will run for three years beginning July 2013.

Members of the network team after a preliminary meeting and workshop on the historic icebreaker Krasin (which was built on the river Tyne in 1916) in St Petersburg in March 2013.