Gail Bratcher is a historian of Modern Russia and Eurasia. My research interests sit at the intersection of the history of environmental science, environmental history, and the history of Russia’s empire. My dissertation, entitled “The Transformation of the Steppe: Ecological Imperialism and Livestock-Agriculture in Kazakhstan, 1891-1964,” tells the history of the changing modes of animal husbandry on the Kazakh Steppe from the first wave of mass Slavic peasant migration to the end of Nikita Khrushchev’s famed Virgin Lands Campaign. Through the lens of “steppe epistemologies”—or coherent, if often unstable and contradictory, understandings of what the steppe is and how best it should be used—I trace how scientists and politicians in Moscow, Almaty, and on the Kazakh Steppe itself shaped relationships between humans, animals, plants, and soils.