Julia Lajus

Membership:  2017

Member Bio

Julia Lajus is an associate professor in the Department of History at the St. Petersburg School of Social Sciences and Humanities in the National Research University Higher School of Economics. She is head of the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History and the academic director of the International Master Program in Applied and Interdisciplinary History, “Usable Pasts.”
Her research interests include environmental and technological history of biological resources, especially in marine and polar areas, and history of field sciences such as fisheries science, oceanography, and geophysics. Julia has published four books in Russian, as well as numerous chapters and papers in monographs and international journals. She has considerable experience in international projects, such as “History of Marine Animal Populations,” led by Poul Holm, ESF EUROCORES “Boreas: Histories from the North” with Ronald Doel, “Assessing Arctic Futures: Voices, Resources and Governance” with Sverker Sorlin, and “Exploring Russia’s Environmental History,” with David Moon (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). From 2011 to 2015, Julia Lajus served as vice president of the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH).

Publications

  • with Jonathan Oldfield and Denis J. B. Shaw. “Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia.” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1, (2015): 1–15.
  • with Sörlin, Sverker. “Melting the Glacial Curtain: The Soft Politics of Scandinavian-Soviet Networks in the Geophysical Field Sciences between Two Polar Years, 1932/33–1957/58.” Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014): 44–59.
  • with Alexei Kraikovski and Dmitry Lajus. ”Coastal Fisheries in the Eastern Baltic Sea (Gulf of Finland) and Its Basin from the 15 to the Early 20th Centuries.” PLOS One 8, no. 10 (2013): e77059.
  • with Henn Ojaveer and Erki Tammiksaar. ”Fisheries at the Estonian Baltic Sea Coast in the First Half of the 19th Century: What Can We Learn from the Archives of Karl Ernst Baer?” Fisheries Research 87 no. 2–3 (2007): 126–36.
  • “In search for Instructive Models: The Russian State at a Crossroads to Conquering the North.” In Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, edited by Dolly Jørgensen & Sverker Sörlin, 110–36. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013.
  • “Colonization of the Russian North: A Frozen Frontier.” In Cultivating the Colony: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies, edited by Christina Folke-Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund, 164–90. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011.