Katja Bruisch – Burning Swamps

Katja Bruisch, Ussher Assistant Professor in Modern Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), discussed her book Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 26 January 2026.

This groundbreaking environmental history recounts the story of Russia’s fossil economy from its margins. Unpacking the forgotten history of how peat fuelled manufacturing industries and power plants in late Imperial and Soviet Russia, Katja Bruisch provides a corrective to more familiar historical narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas. Attentive to the intertwined histories of matter and labor during a century of industrial peat extraction, she offers a fresh perspective on the modern Russian economy that moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary. By identifying peat extraction in modern Russia as a crucial chapter in the degradation of the world’s peatlands, Bruisch makes a compelling case for paying attention to seemingly marginal places, people, and resources as we tell the histories of the planetary emergency.