Current Projects

I have three ongoing book projects.

1/ I am finishing a book, provisionally entitled Soviet Science and the Making of Stalin’s Gulag, under contract with Oxford University Press. This book asks a question that has hitherto remained largely unexplored: what was the role of intellectual labor in the life of the Gulag? Or to put it another way, how might our understanding of the Gulag shift once we account for the role of scientists and engineers, both as prisoners and free employees, in its functioning? In exploring this thread, I suggest that the Gulag—the vast network of labor camps, colonies, and special settlements that existed from the 1930s to the 1950s in the Soviet Union, was enabled at a fundamental level by the availability of specialists—academics, scientists, engineers, architects, and technicians—who helped give it a rationale, aided in making it functional, and provided the knowledge and expertise to enable its expansion. In doing so, they gave form to the spatial logic of the Gulag, organizing the labor camp system not only along geographical terms but in creating diverse epistemological spaces for the production and circulation of knowledge. These specialists helped select the sites to locate labor camps, they led expeditions of prisoners to seek new resources, they designed the infrastructure which prisoners built, they studied the landscape to uncover more mines (and demanded more prisoners for their work), and they planned and designed the camps and the co-located Gulag cities that dotted the Soviet Arctic. Many (although not all) of these scientists and engineers were themselves prisoners of the Gulag, having fallen victim to violent attacks waged by the Soviet political police against the scientific and technical intelligentsia beginning the late 1920s. Soviet science’s entanglement with the coercive apparatus of the Stalinist state, including with the Gulag, then reverberated across generations in marking Soviet science as a field rife with factionalism, conflict, and an obsession with secrecy.

At a fundamental level, the book offers a re-reading of the history of one of the largest carceral camp systems of the twentieth century—the Stalinist Gulag—as a history of science and technology,

2/ I am also writing a second book, provisionally entitled Departure Gates: Postcolonial Histories of Space on Earth, under contract with MIT Press. This book is an attempt to wrest the history of space exploration from its normative fetishization of Western triumphalism in the form of machines, men, and manifest destiny. Instead, the book highlights the considerable infrastructure built in the Global South during the Cold War to support space exploration, and in doing so, proposes an alternative, postcolonial, and global history of spaceflight, one that happened not in space, but on Earth. It argues that space activities during the Cold War, typically associated with high-minded utopian impulses or bipolar superpower competition, simultaneously engendered conditions redolent of colonial modes of exploitation, displacement, and erasure. These practices were reproduced globally in fluid networks through exchanges of experts, technologies, and knowledge.

3/ Finally, I am under contract to write a fully revised version of my first book on the history of the Soviet space program, which covers everything from its beginnings in occupied Germany in 1945 to the collapse of its Moon program thirty years later. Provisionally titled The Soviet Union and the Space Race, the book will be published in two volumes by the University of Nebraska Press. The new edition will be a fully integrated work that combines the history of Soviet human spaceflight—focusing in particular on the flights of the early cosmonauts in the 1960s and the failed attempt to send cosmonauts to the Moon—with the social, cultural, and intellectual history of cosmic enthusiasm in postwar Soviet Union. In it, I argue that Soviet successes in space were largely the result of a centralized command structure of innovation while later, their system faltered, when they began to emulate more market-oriented forms of research and development.