Julia Lajus received her degree in the history of science (the Russian equivalent of Ph.D. degree) from the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in Moscow in 2004 with a dissertation devoted to the history of relations between fisheries science and fisheries in the European North of Russia/Soviet Union. She is now working on a book manuscript, “Linking People through Fish, Climate and Environment: Transnational Connections of Russian/Soviet Science and Their Mediators,“ which explores encounters between international and national interests at governmental, institutional and individual levels, in which all parties needed to craft strategies for successful scientific cooperation. In 2001-10 she led a Russian team on the large-scale project “History of Marine Animal Populations,” part of the global Census of Marine Life, and participated in the international project “Boreas: Histories from the North,” which resulted in publications on the history of science in the Arctic. She continued studying the history of Arctic science and environment in several projects in cooperation with scholars from Sweden. In 2009 Lajus was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK), and later cooperated with that University on the project on the history of Soviet climate science. In 2011-15 Julia Lajus served as vice-president of the European Society for Environmental History. Until spring 2022 Lajus led the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. In 2014-19 she also served as an Academic Head of the International MA Program in Applied and Interdisciplinary History “Usable Pasts,” Russia’s very first MA program in history taught completely in English.
Julia Lajus
Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History