I am a historian who is intellectually and emotionally connected to anthropological ideas and long-term fieldwork, and an anthropologist who has fallen in love with diachronic interpretations of social and cultural practices. My bi-disciplinary identity is shaped by my curiosity about our everyday lives, which are inseparable from our imaginations. I am interested in how the paths, ideas, and practices of scholars and the people they collaborate with intersect, coevolve, and ultimately shape our "stable" notions of the environment, materiality, social life, and the past. This curiosity drives me to constantly move between the vibrant "field" in the Arctic/Siberia (predominantly with the Nenets and Altaians) and the secluded and dusty "archives," where I find inspiration and develop most of my ideas. The arguments in my writings often revolve around the intertwined lives of anthropological and natural science ideas, the long-term dynamics of human-environment interactions in the circumpolar North, and how these are narrated and inscribed in the scholarship and novels of Indigenous and settler-colonial authors.

I am currently finalizing my first book manuscript, “The Northern Book of Origin: Siberian Indigenous Narratives and Metropolitan Ethnogenesis Theories” (under contract with the University of Nebraska Press). This work explores the history of how Russian and Soviet anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists have constructed theories of Indigenous origin (ethnogenesis) based on stories recorded from Siberian and Northern Indigenous communities about underground dwellers who coexisted with or preceded today’s Indigenous peoples, as well as on artifacts they collected. Through this exploration, the book uncovers the intricate dynamics of knowledge (co-)production between scholars and communities under various political regimes, and highlights how these evolving theories have shaped—and, at times, strained—academic connections worldwide.

My second book project explores the environmental and Indigenous history of the remote Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya.

I enjoy teaching a variety of courses related to Russian and Eurasian histories and cultures.

Independent Study/Research Internship: The Right to Write: Documenting Minoritized Literatures and Cultures in Russia (in class, together with Dr. Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner; SP 2025)

Russian 8550: Writing on the “Margins”: Indigenous Siberian and Northern Literatures (in class, Graduate seminar, SP 2025)

Russian 3750: [Alter]Native Russia: Indigenous Histories, Cultures, and Politics in Siberia and the North (GE: Foundations: Race, Ethnicity and Gender Diversity, in class, 3 cr., SP 2025)

Slavic 3333: The Space Age (GE: Foundations: Historical and Cultural Studies, online, 3 cr., SP 2024, AU 2024)

Russian 3480.01: The Russian Spy: Cultures of Surveillance, Secret Agents, and Hacking from the Cold War through Today (GE: Visual and Performing Arts/Diversity: Global Studies, in class, 3 cr., SP 2024) 

Some recent articles and book chapters

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. (forthcoming). “Under the Shadow of a Mushroom Cloud: An Indigenous Nenets Hunter, the Tsar Bomba, and Entangled Sovereignty on a Russian Arctic Archipelago.” In The Indigenous Citizenship Act at 100. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. (forthcoming). “Rooting in the Subterranean: Underground Dwellers in Northern Indigenous Narratives and Metropolitan Anthropological Theories.” In Lest We Forget: Recovering Ancestors in Anthropological Traditions, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach. Vol. 15. Histories of Anthropology Annual. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. (forthcoming). “More Than a Shaman: The Life History of An Altai Shepherd Surrounded by Sacred Mountains, Siberian Ethnographers, and Anthropological Ideas.” In Anthropology of Siberia in the Making: Openings and Closures from the 1840s to the Present, edited by Virginie Vaté and Joachim Otto Habeck. Vol. 50. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia. Berlin, Münster: LIT Verlag.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., and David G. Anderson. (forthcoming). “Proxies and Partial Connections in an Anthropologist’s Archive.” The British Journal for the History of Science.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., and Laura Siragusa. (forthcoming). “When Siberian Indigenous Inscriptive Practices Meet Slavic and Eurasian Literature Studies.” In Inclusive Strategies and Critical Pedagogies for East European and Eurasian Languages, edited by Sunnie Rucker-Chang and Rachel Stauffer. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., Sergei A. Kan, and Laura Siragusa. 2024. “Res Publica Literaria Frantsa Boasa, ili kak postroitʹ transnatsionalʹnuiu antropologiiu s pomoshchʹiu pisem.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 5(189). [in Russian]

Siragusa, Laura, and Dmitri Arzioutov. 2024. “Rien ne se perd : du développement durable dans les pratiques des communautés autochtones du Nord russe.” Slavica Occitania, no. 58 (April), 301–24. [in French]

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. 2024. “The Making of the Homo Polaris: Human Acclimatization to the Arctic Environment and Soviet Ideologies in Northern Medical Institutions.” Settler Colonial Studies 14 (2): 180–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2023.2274673.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. 2019. “Environmental Encounters: Woolly Mammoth, Indigenous Communities and Metropolitan Scientists in the Soviet Arctic.” Polar Record 55 (3): 142–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247419000299.

Anderson, David G., and Dmitry V. Arzyutov. 2019. “The Etnos Archipelago: Sergei M. Shirokogoroff and the Life History of a Controversial Anthropological Concept.” Current Anthropology 60 (6): 741–73. https://doi.org/10.1086/704685.

For More Info:  https://u.osu.edu/arzyutov/