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.  Broadly, her work has explored how greater attention to the Soviet Union’s eastern periphery might challenge conventional understandings of the Soviet field.  

At present, she's at work on a book, Elusive Water: The Life and Death of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, about the causes and consequences of the demise of Central Asia’s Aral Sea.  Once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea began to shrink dramatically in the 1960s, as Soviet officials directed water from the rivers that fed the sea towards cotton production. By 1983, the Soviet Union ranked as the world’s second largest producer of cotton.  But the people who lived around the sea were confronting a wide-ranging disaster that encompassed environmental degradation, cultural destruction, economic collapse and sweeping impacts on human health. In 2017, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the disappearance of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, “probably the biggest ecological catastrophe of our time.”  

Beginning in the 19th century and concluding in the present day, Cameron’s book analyzes the political, economic and cultural forces that came to transform the Aral Sea and its environs, a region that today is part of three different countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan).  The book places the people who live around the sea at the heart of the story, and it considers what their experiences of loss, adaptation and hope might offer us as we confront climate change today.

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 the 1930s.  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. A Ukrainian translation is forthcoming.

In 2022, in recognition of her public-facing scholarship, Cameron was named a Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation.  She has also held fellowships at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, 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 in Washington, DC.  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.