Hi! My name is Jon Adsit, and I am a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington.
I study History, specifically Russian history, while integrating environmental and Indigenous history into my work.
My dissertation research centers on transformation both environmental and social in the Sakha Republic during the late Imperial and early Soviet periods, with particular attention to how Indigenous communities navigated the pressures of extractive industry and state development. More broadly, I study the entangled histories of empire, Indigeneity, and environment across the Russian Far North and North Pacific, including work on Russian America, Chukotka, and Kamchatka. I am especially interested in how so-called peripheral spaces were shaped by—and in turn helped shape—projects of imperial and Soviet modernity.