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Katja Doose and Christine Bichsel Win 2026 Levin Article Prize
We are delighted to announce that Dr Katja Doose of Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Dr Christine Bichsel of the University of Fribourg are the recipients of the 2026 Levin Article Prize.
Drawing from both archival sources and nineteenth-century scientific periodicals, “Growing Deserts and Shrinking Glaciers: The Desiccation Debates and Climate Change in the Late Nineteenth Century” by Katja Doose and Christine Bichsel presents an engaging analysis of the debates on climate change in Central Asia taking place in the late Russian Empire. Particularly noteworthy is how the authors skillfully read against the grain of predominantly imperial sources to consider indigenous perspectives. Throughout the article, they deftly connect the different levels of their research, namely, the influence of political interests on scientific inquiry and the relationship between environmental and social discourses. The innovative study, moreover, places the debates on climate change taking place in the late Russian Empire within a broader geopolitical context. In doing so, Doose and Bichsel answer the timely call for a critical climate history.
Katja Doose is Junior Professor of Environmental History at Université Lumière Lyon 2. She is an environmental historian and historian of science specializing in Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Her research examines the production of knowledge about environmental change, the relationship between science and resource extraction, and mountains as sites of scientific research. She is the author of Tektonik der Perestroika: Das Erdbeben und die Neuordnung Armeniens, 1985–1998 (2019) and numerous articles on the environmental and scientific history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
Christine Bichsel is a scholar of political geography and environmental history. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Berne. Her research explores how relations of power and violence shape knowledge, infrastructure and the environment. She is the author of the book Conflict Transformation in Central Asia: Irrigation Disputes in the Ferghana Valley (2009). Her current research explores the history of Russian and Soviet glaciology in Central Asia, focusing on how Imperial Russian and Soviet science identified glaciers as scientific objects and established a relationship between glacier changes and time. Her research has been funded by the SNSF project “Timescapes of Ice: Soviet Glacier Science in Central Asia, 1950s to 1980s” (2021–2025), the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) grant “Fedchenko: An Eco-Biography of a Glacier” (2023–2025) and the Swiss Polar Institute (SPI) project “History of Glacier Science” (2024–2026).
Named in honor of Eve Levin, who served as the journal’s editor from 1996 to 2020, the Levin Article Prize is awarded to the article published in Russian Review in the previous calendar year judged to be the best by an independent committee of advanced graduate students in Russian and Eurasian studies drawn from institutions across the United States.
The journal is grateful to Alexey Kotelvas, Keegan Lundman, Polina Varfolomeeva, Andrew A. Whittington-Biehle, and Carina Zhur for serving on the prize committee. If you are a scholar interested in being considered for the prize in the future, send us your manuscripts! All articles published in the journal in the previous calendar year will be considered for the award.