Dr. Anna Mazanik

Anna Mazanik is a research fellow at the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe and the academic coordinator of the research project “Russia’s North Pacific” of the Max Weber Foundation and LMU Munich. She worked at the RCC as a doctoral program coordinator in 2019–2020.

Anna Mazanik is an environmental and medical historian, particularly interested in the history of environmental health and the role of animals in the context of health and disease. Her first book, Sanitizing Moscow: Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), offers an environmental history of urban public health reforms in Moscow between 1870 and 1917. Mazanik is currently working on a book project, titled “Nature’s Infections: Vectors, Viruses, and Soviet Medicine in the Pacific Borderlands, 1930–1970,” which studies Soviet experience with two endemic diseases of the Pacific region—tick-borne encephalitis and Japanese encephalitis—in Primorie, North Korea, and China in the context of the Second World War and the Cold War.

Selected Publications:

• with Benjamin Beuerle, Sandra Dahlke, and Andreas Renner, eds. Environments, Resources, and Infrastructures Between Russia and the Asia-Pacific. Heidelberg University Publishing, forthcoming.
• Sanitizing Moscow: Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025.
• “Arbovirology and Cold War Collaborations: A Transnational History of the Tick-Borne Encephalitis Vaccine, 1930–1980.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 79, no. 3 (2024): 254–73. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrad054.
• “Public Health Across Species: Domestic Animals and Sanitary Reforms in Imperial Russia.” In Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally, edited by Catherine Evtukhov, Julia Lajus, and David Moon. Berghahn Books, 2023. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390275.
• “Environmental Change and the Soviet Media Before 1986: Dissident and Officially Sanctioned Voices.” In Climate Change Discourse in Russia: Past and Present, edited by Marianna Poberezhskaya and Teresa Ashe. Routledge, 2020.
• “Industrial Waste, River Pollution, and Water Politics in Central Russia, 1880–1917.” Water History 10 (2018): 207–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-017-0207-0.