Susan Jones, University of Minnesota

"Entangled Histories of Plague Ecology in Russia and the USSR, 1880-1960"

Bubonic plague emerged from ancient homelands in Central Asia in the 1860s and eventually spread around the world. Russian and Soviet scientists made lengthy expeditions to plague's homelands, theorized the complec ecology of plague, and in the process facilitating the internal colonization of indigenous Central Asian peoples. This paper argues that plague both shaped (and was shaped by) scientific, indigenous, and colonial rhetoric and activities in Russian/Soviet Central Asia during the long twentieth century.