Fellow 2026 Saulesh Yessenova
Saulesh Yessenova received her PhD in Anthropology from McGill University in 2003. She is the author of The Politics and Poetics of the Nation: Urban Narratives of Kazakh Identity (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009), a monograph based on her PhD thesis.
Upon graduation, she was awarded a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) post-doctoral fellowship (2003/05), which she took to the University of British Columbia. In 2005-2008, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. She carried out a project on a critical conjunction of nation/state-building and crude oil, the key endeavours that Kazakhstan launched upon independence. At present, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Canada. In her latest research supported by SSHRC, she has been particularly interested in public spectacles, Cold War nuclear disasters and the relationship between the environment, politics, imagination, and outer space.
Her latest publication is “The Russian Ecology of Leaving Earth” (Representations, vol. 167, nr.1, UC Press, 2024). She continues to focus on Kazakhstan’s nuclear history and anthropology. Committed to an ethnographic mode of inquiry, she always tries to expand her perspective, learning from historiographic and literary analyses and social studies of science and technology. This interdisciplinary approach has been especially productive in her focus on technopolitical catastrophes and vulnerability of life in the (post-) nuclear anthropocene. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript, Apocalypse by Deterrence.