The third annual Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series will take place on Thursday, May 15th, 2025, at 12:30pm at the Cowell Provost House. This event will be livestreamed and recorded (link to be provided soon).

This year’s guest speaker is Andy Bruno, Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History and Professor, Indiana University Bloomington. Professor Bruno’s lecture is titled “An Environmental History of the Tunguska Mystery.”

In 1908, the Tunguska explosion in Siberia knocked down an area of forest larger than London. While most scientists now believe that an airburst from an asteroid caused the blast, unmistakable remnants of a space rock have never been found. Over the last century, the mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from science fiction writers and voluntary researchers. Some have even explained Tunguska as a nuclear explosion triggered by aliens. This presentation will recount the intriguing history of the Tunguska event and the investigations into it. Foregrounding the significance of mystery in environmental and Soviet history, it will show how efforts to understand the explosion have shaped the treatment of the landscape, how uncertainty allowed alternative forms of knowledge to enter scientific conversations, and how cosmic disasters have influenced the past and might affect the future.

Andy Bruno works as a professor in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington, where he holds the Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History. A specialist in the environmental history of the Soviet Union, he is the author of The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016) and Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and its Environmental Legacy (2022), which recently appeared in paperback.

This event is made possible by The Maya K. Peterson Memorial Endowment and is co-sponsored by the UCSC History Department.

The Maya K. Peterson Explorations in History Seminar Series at UCSC honors the life and spirit of a brilliant scholar, teacher, and mentor whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 2021. A specialist in Russian, Central Asian and environmental history, Maya was a valued member of UCSC’s faculty in the History Department and the Humanities Division. The Explorations in History Seminar Series celebrates Maya’s passions for the study of history, for dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, and for innovative scholarship across disciplines—passions that she shared generously with students, colleagues, and communities around the globe.