Sarah Cameron Named 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow

Carnegie Fellowship to Study Aral Sea

Sarah Cameron has been named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. From the Maryland Today article: "[Her ]Carnegie stipend will support historical research on one of the 20th century’s gravest environmental catastrophes: the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Bisected by the border between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south and once one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water, the sea began to decline dramatically in the late 1960s when Soviet officials directed large volumes of water toward cotton production, devastating communities in the region. Today, water levels in some parts of the sea are partially restored.

Chemists, hydrologists, geographers and others have developed a body of scientific literature on the Aral Sea, but she plans to publish the first complete book-length account of the causes and effects of the disaster based upon archival materials and oral history interviews.

Cameron also recently received fellowships for the same project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, as well as a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her first book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, won four book awards and two honorable mentions.

'I am thrilled and very grateful for the support of the Carnegie Corporation,' Cameron said. 'This gives me the time and resources to do justice to a significant, understudied history that offers important lessons both for policymakers and the broader public.'”