What are your main areas of research and teaching interests?

Nataliia Laas

I am interested in environmental history, the history of energy, political economies of socialism and capitalism, consumer society and discard studies, and the history of the social sciences in Eurasia, with a particular focus on the Soviet Union.

Marjan Wardaki

I am a historian of South Asia and the history of science, with interests in empire, migration, and the history of knowledge. My teaching and research approach the history of science and medicine through novel sources, unexpected figures, and a strong commitment to the historian’s crafts.

Can you share a brief overview of your academic journey & what brought you to WashU?

I was born and raised in Ukraine and came to the United States as a graduate student in 2015. I received my PhD in History from Brandeis University and then spent the next three years working as a postdoctoral fellow. My first postdoctoral fellowship was at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University, after which I moved to the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. I was blessed with a team of outstanding mentors, colleagues, and fellow postdoctoral and doctoral researchers who contributed to my growth as a historian. I hope to continue cultivating and expanding the communities of intellectual exchange and support within and beyond the university as I start my new role as an Assistant Professor of Environmental History here at WashU. Moreover, I am impressed by the St. Louis art scene and can’t wait to visit the Art Museum, take a glass-blowing workshop at Third Degree Glass, and try a class in woodworking with salvaged materials at Perennial reuse studio.

I was born in Kabul in the midst of the Russian occupation and became a refugee in Germany at a very young age. I grew up in Germany, where I attended a bilingual Gymnasium and learned arbitrary languages such as Latin, but also French and Italian. I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UC Irvine, and my PhD at UCLA. I was the first graduate student there to train across multiple fields, which required extensive reading and examinations – training that I now value deeply. After lecturing briefly at CSULB, I began a two-year postdoc at Yale University, where I worked with incredible collaborators and students. I chose WashU because its history department brings together scholars working across diverse periods and regions, including the early modern period, for which I have a quiet admiration. I especially value our thematic clusters.

What’s a current project, course, or idea that you’re especially excited about?

I am working on a book about waste and socialist environmental thinking. The book’s working title is A Soviet Consumer Republic: Environmental Citizenship and the Economy of Waste in the Post-WWII Soviet Union. Historians usually think about the late Soviet economy as the economy primarily plagued by shortages, whereas I show that its chief difficulty was in fact overproduction and waste.

As I argue in my book, concerns over waste represented a form of mass environmental thinking under socialism that defined the proper relations between the economy and the environment. Politicized “waste anxieties” prompted people to defend their consumer and environmental rights and to reimagine their relationship with the socialist state through the idea of environmental citizenship. I hope that by uncovering socialist waste, my book will urge us to rethink modern history as a history of the global movement of toxins, discards, and useless objects.

This project has received the 2025 ACLS Fellowship award from the American Council of Learned Societies, which will allow me to spend one year on research leave finishing the book manuscript.

I am currently completing my first book – the first study to examine the history of the scientific diaspora. It traces the journeys of South Asian scientists who traveled to interwar Germany to reshape the landscape of modern science outside the reach of the British Empire. The book argues that these migrants transformed both European and South Asian science by combining German “Technik” with Indo-Persian, Islamic, and artisanal traditions.

Having been in St. Louis for over a year now, I would say that both my colleagues and WashU students have been an incredible source of joy and support. My students come to class prepared and embrace my unconventional ideas for exploring the history of science through field trips, volunteering at local farms, and “Cooking Your Final Exam”.  I’m also super thrilled about an upcoming symposium and special issue I have co-organized with members of my department.

Is there anything you are looking forward to as you are settling into the department, the university, or the St. Louis area?

This fall, I will be teaching a course on the history of the twentieth-century Russia. This course has a broad chronological scope and will explore Russian history from the demise of the Russian Empire in 1905–1917 through the creation of the Soviet Union after the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the birth of Putinism. One central goal of this course is to comprehend authoritarianism. The current crisis of liberal institutions and democracy across the world begs a closer look at the historical legacy of authoritarian regimes. I am convinced that Russian history can offer us this chance as the country lived through three autocracies in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s regime. Consider the Soviet Union for a moment. It was a unique experiment in creating an economy and society free from capitalist oppression that offers insights on how illiberal politics was able to undermine socialism’s initial radicalism and liberation promises. Another key task of this course is to grapple with Russian imperialism. Though only the Russian Empire openly acknowledged its imperial status, many Soviet and post-Soviet Russia’s policies reveal imperial endurance lurking beneath the surface of various state formations and ideological regimes. It is not accidental that Vladimir Putin compares himself to the eighteenth-century Russian emperor Peter the Great while attempting to justify his country’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine.

I find St. Louis to be an incredibly engaging city and there is something to do for everyone. I try to visit the Tower Grove Farmer’s market whenever I can, where I buy my local jam -and, if I'm lucky, good sourdough bread too. I look forward to finding more vintage furniture that tell stories about St. Louis. I love collecting and refurbishing these pieces. One thing I have yet to do is take classes at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where I hope to learn how to build terrariums.