Dr. Johanna Conterio

Johanna Conterio is an environmental historian of Modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with a geographical research focus on the “subtropical” south and the Black Sea, in transnational and international context. She is interested in intersections between environment and health (including the environmental knowledge produced through medical research), nature protection, urban planning, and maritime environments. She is currently lecturer in International and Modern European History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and from July 2022, will be associate professor of environmental history in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. She is the curator of a special forum on “The Black Sea World and the Question of Boundaries,” published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies in 2018, which drew on a workshop that she convened on The Black Sea in the Socialist World in 2015.

From 2022 through 2024, she will be an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, working on a new project on urban green and blue spaces in the Soviet Union. This project investigates the relationship between urban ecology, urban planning, policing, and public health in Stalinist urbanism, traced through the lens of urban green and blue spaces, intended and unintended.

RCC Research Project: Controlling Ecologies, Controlling People: Urban Planning, Social Engineering, and the Politics of Green Space in the Soviet Union, 1931–1941

Selected Publications:

• “Controlling Land, Controlling People: Urban Greening and the Territorial Turn in Theories of Urban Planning in the Soviet Union, 1931–1932.” Journal of Urban History 48, no. 3 (May 2022): 479–503.
• “Curative Nature: Medical Foundations of Soviet Nature Protection, 1917–1941.” Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 23–49.

• “‘Our Black Sea Coast’: The Sovietization of the Black Sea Littoral under Khrushchev and the Problem of Overdevelopment.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 327–361.
• “Places of Plenty: Patient Perspectives on Nutrition and Health in the Health Resorts of the USSR, 1917–1953.” Food & History 14, no. 1 (2016): 113–140.
• with Ana Antic and Dora Vargha. “Beyond Liberal Internationalism.” Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (May 2016): 359–371.
• “Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1928–1936.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 91–120.