Geopolitics and the Environment in Central Asia (Part of Climate Week NYC)

This panel has been organized by Yale’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program (REEES) as the inaugural event of its Central Asia Initiative, a multiyear program of events and partnerships meant to boost Central Asian studies at Yale and beyond. “Geopolitics and the Environment in Central Asia” features scholarship on the environmental histories of the region and their relevance for pressing social, economic, political, and climate concerns of today. Sarah Cameron will present fresh research on the infamous environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea, and suggest how we might apply those lessons to similar cases of shrinking bodies of water around the globe. Taylor Zajicek will trace environmental and geopolitical change from the nineteenth century to today through the region’s commodities (i.e. cotton, caviar, hydrocarbons). In conversation with Claire Roosien, they will also touch on the contemporary climate context in Central Asia and the world.

Dr. Taylor Zajicek is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, and a lecturer in Columbia University’s Department of History. Zajicek is a historian of environment and geopolitics. His first book project—Black Sea, Cold War—analyzes the intersection of diplomacy, science, and environmental change in the modern Black Sea region. The manuscript builds on Zajicek’s dissertation work at Princeton University, which won the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Oxford University Prize for international history in 2024. For his next book project, Zajicek intends to write a history of Central Asia’s transnational deserts. His fieldwork has been sponsored by institutions such as the Fulbright-Hays Program, Social Science Research Council, and Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. In fall 2025, Zajicek looks forward to joining the Williams College Department of History as an assistant professor.

Sarah Cameron is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, with particular research interests in environmental history, genocide and crimes against humanity, and the societies and cultures of Central Asia. In her research and in her teaching, she enjoys tackling historical topics that have broad public resonance, both in the region and in the West. Her book on the Kazakh famine of the 1930s, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018) won numerous awards in the United States.  It also provoked intense discussion in Kazakhstan where the famine remains a largely forbidden topic, in part due to the country’s close relationship with Russia.  At present, she is at work on a new book, Aral: Life and Death of a Sea, about the causes and consequences of the demise of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. In 2022, Prof. Cameron was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.  She received her PhD in history from Yale University.

Claire Roosien is a cultural historian of modern Eurasia. Her forthcoming book, Socialism Mediated: the Making of Soviet Mass Culture in Central Asia, examines how Central Asians participated in making Socialist Realism in the region, redefining what it meant to be Soviet and Uzbek while also navigating the realities of Soviet empire. She has published articles in Kritika, Central Asian Survey, and Slavic Review. She is currently beginning research on a new book project about the intersection of media history and hydroaesthetics in Central Asia.