Prospecting and bioprospecting on Russia’s cotton frontier: Commodities and empire in tsarist Central Asia

By  Dr. Jennifer Keating (UCD) as part of NUI Galway History Research Seminar Series  Semester 1, 2019-20

Recently appointed to a post at University College Dublin, Jennifer Keating is a historian of imperial Russia specialising in environmental history. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines the role of environmental change in colonial policy, practice and resistance on Russia’s southern frontier in modern-day Central Asia from 1881 to 1916, via the region’s eco-systems, forests, fields, deserts, minerals and water sources. She is co-editor of Empty Spaces: Perspectives on emptiness in modern history (2019), a volume that explores the construction and use of tropes of emptiness in histories of land, sea and air in the modern world.