I am a historian of earth and environmental science specializing in the culture of science in modern and early modern Russia.   My research is on knowledge creation and imperial governance in the Russian mining industry from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.  In the book manuscript I am preparing for publication, Tsardom of Rock: Science, Society, and Enlightenment in Russia’s Mining Empire, I examine how leaders of the mining industry developed new methods of knowing and ruling Russia’s natural environment and imperial subjects, in the process forging the modern Russian Empire.  I also work on the interplay of geological thought and Russian Orthodoxy and on the intellectual aftershocks of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.  My primary research and teaching relationship is with the Program of History of Science and Technology.

Education

PhD, 2016, Yale University

Scientific & Professional Societies

Currently Teaching Courses

• Understanding the Russian Land
• Women in Science: A Historical Perspective
• Historiography of Science and Technology

Selected Publications

Anna Graber, "Mining and Metallurgy in Early Imperial Russia," in Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences, ed. Elena Aronova, David Sepkoski, and Marco Tamborini (Cham: Springer, 2024). 

Anna Graber, “Depicting Expertise and Managing Diversity in the Urals Mining Industry (1773-1819),” in Picturing Russian Empire, ed. Valerie Kivelson, Sergei Kozlov, and Joan Neuberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 156-163.

Anna Graber et al., “The Natural Turn in Early Modern Russian History,” Vivliofika: E-Journal of Eighteeenth-Century Russian Studies 6 (2018): 1-12.