I am a historian of earth and environmental science specializing in the culture of science in modern and early modern Russia. I received my Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2016. Before coming to Minnesota, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a research fellowship at Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia), and I taught at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). 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. I teach courses on Russian environmental history and history of science; gender and science; the Enlightenment; and the Cold War.
Specialties
History of earth science and natural history; Enlightenment science; history of mining and metallurgy; science and empire; modern and early modern Russia
Anna Graber, "Depicting Expertise and Managing Diversity in the Urals Mining Industry (1773-1818)," in Picturing Russian Empire, ed. Valerie Kivelson, Sergei Kozlov, and Joan Neuberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 156-63.
Anna Graber et al., “Introduction: The Natural Turn in Early Modern Russian History,” Vivliofika: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 6 (2018), 1-12 (commissioned special edition of Vivlfiofika edited with Clare Griffin, Rachel Koroloff, and Audra Yoder).