Assoc ProfessorJennifer Keating

I am a historian of empire and environment working on imperial Russia in general and Central Asia in particular. A common aim of my research to date has been to understand various types of environmental change as being profoundly and inherently political, both in cause and consequence. Overall, my interests lie in tracing the ways in which shifting socio-ecological relations and practices of land use across Russian Eurasia were integral to the dynamic decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that marked the collapse of the empire and the birth of the new Soviet state.

My first book, On arid ground: Political ecologies of empire in Russian Central Asia (OUP, 2022) explored the environmental imprint of Russian colonisation in Turkestan to reveal the ways in which ecological change was central to the building and breaking of empire. On arid ground won the 2023 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize for the best debut book in European or World History, and was awarded an Honourable Mention in the 2022 BASEES Alexander Nove Prize (awarded in 2024). I have also published on environmental violence in Turkestan during the early civil wars years of 1916-1919, and with Courtney J. Campbell and Allegra Giovine was co-editor of Empty Spaces: Perspectives on emptiness in modern history (University of London Press, 2019), a multidisciplinary volume that explores the construction and use of tropes of emptiness in histories of land, sea and air in the modern world.

More recently, I have published work that explores the relationships between Central Asian nomadic pastoralists, Tian Shan mountain ecosystems and multiscalar capital networks in the Journal of Global History, and am interested in pursuing research that can address alternative archives at the intersection of the natural sciences, anthropology and archaeology.

I am currently the PI of the ERC-funded project ‘Land Limits: Towards a connected history of population, environmental change, capital and conflict in Russian Eurasia, 1860s-1920s’. This multi-sited, multi-scalar research project examines a wide repertoire of ecological transformations across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to situated, material histories of rural spaces and communities in the former Russian empire. We seek to understand the social, political and economic implications of evolving human-nature relations in the age of empire, taking seriously rural places, everyday practices and people who are sometimes overlooked in histories of ‘modernisation’ and political breakdown. Our work currently delves into forests, vineyards, mines, beehives, gardens, pastures, fields and villages across Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russian Poland. Part of my research within the project focuses on the shifting relations between pastoralists, migrant settlers and multispecies ecosystems in the uplands of Central and Inner Asia. For more information on Land Limits, and our team of excellent researchers, see here.

More broadly, inspired by the suggestion that scholars seek ‘the particular in the planetary - and the planetary in the particular', I situate my work within the global framing of the Anthropocene (and its critiques), and hope to help give Central Asia and Russia greater prominence in international scholarship on the topic. Allied to this, I am an enthusiastic supporter of making history writing a more socially and intellectually egalitarian endeavour.