My second monograph project is an environmental history of one of the planet’s least studied corners—the deserts of Central Asia. Red Sun analyzes state efforts to tame these arid landscapes, from the Russian conquest of 1881 to the present, and from the Caspian to West China. Inhospitable and remote, deserts were unsteady foundations for state authority. But they also had their uses. Talented historians have studied Russian schemes to irrigate Central Asia, but less well-known are the deserts’ other lives—as places of forced labor, resistance, profit, energy, and science. From seismology to oil extraction, and from nuclear testing to narcotics, Red Sun considers the Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet relationship with transnational peripheries. Just as the 1970 Soviet film White Sun of the Desert follows a Red Army soldier on his personal civilizing mission in the Karakum Desert, Red Sun will examine imperial agents and their technologies. But it will also profile the Central Asian actors that joined and resisted these incursions. By charting Central Asia’s environmental transformation across three centuries, Red Sun speaks to pressing contemporary issues such as petro-authoritarianism, insurgency, and climate change. Central Asia’s deserts lie at the confluence of Eurasia’s most influential states (China, Iran, India, and Russia) and are warming between two and three times faster than the global average. The region will play an important if yet unobvious role it a hotter world.

In its use of concepts from the history of environment, technology, and science, Red Sun is informed methodologically by my dissertation on the Black Sea. Thematically, it draws from my work on earthquakes in Russian-ruled Turkestan. Yet the project also demands additional expertise. I have laid the groundwork for this endeavor by studying Persian at Princeton, Uzbek with a tutor in Tashkent, and Uyghur in an online course.