Awards

Titled Professor - 2024

Stephen F. Cohen Chair in Russian History

About Andy Bruno

Andy Bruno joined the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington as the inaugural Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History in Fall 2024. A specialist in the environmental history of the Soviet Union, his work has sought to demonstrate the pertinence of environmental perspectives to a myriad of interpretive questions and debates about the region. Among other themes, he has written about animals and avalanches, climate and conservation, energy and economy, geology and gender, labor and lakes, mysteries and meteorites, revolution and reindeer, subjectivity and socialism, and waste and warfare. His work highlights the potency of non-human nature and places Russia’s environmental history in comparative and global contexts. It has often focused on specific locations, such as borderlands in the Arctic and the Siberian wilderness. Bruno has collaborated with interdisciplinary teams in the environmental humanities and natural sciences on varied projects. He is the author of The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His main current project explores the environmental logics and implications of economic growth in Soviet state-socialism.