Sarah Cameron

Sarah Cameron is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union.  Her research interests include genocide and crimes against humanity, environmental history, and the societies and cultures of Central Asia.

At present, she is at work on a new book, “The Aral Sea: Environment, Society, and State Power in Central Asia.”  The book offers the first complete account of one of the twentieth century’s worst environmental catastrophes, the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Contrary to the conventional view of the Aral Sea as a specifically Soviet tragedy, Cameron finds that many states and international actors played a role in the disaster.  Interweaving an examination of high politics with voices of the people who lived by the sea, the book underscores the urgency of finding more sustainable methods to produce cotton.

In 2022, Cameron was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2022-2024). Funds from the Carnegie Foundation will help support her research on the Aral Sea.

Cameron’s first book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines a little-known crime of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in the disaster, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population.

The book won four book awards (the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize, the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies Book Prize) and two honorable mentions (the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize and the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies ).  It also provoked intense discussion in Kazakhstan, where the famine remains a partially forbidden topic in part due to Kazakhstan's close relationship with Russia.  Russian and Kazakh translations of the book have been released.

Cameron has held fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  Her research has been supported by Fulbright, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Mellon/The American Council for Learned Societies, the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research (NCEEER) and others.  She received her PhD from Yale University.