I am a historian and anthropologist of the Arctic and Siberia whose work examines how knowledge of the North is produced, circulated, and authorized. At the center of my research are the relationships between Indigenous and local intellectual traditions and academic forms of knowledge—not as separate domains, but as historically entangled and unequally positioned ways of understanding the world. 

I trace how encounters among Indigenous and local communities, scholars, missionaries, museums, archives, and states have generated concepts, narratives, and classifications that traveled across imperial and national borders.

My research asks how Indigenous and local concepts of the past and history have been understood, translated, and contested in North Eurasia; how categories of Indigeneity and ethnicity have shaped Soviet and post-Soviet identity politics; and how northern communities have interpreted their relationships with the environment through everyday practices, oral traditions, writing, and material culture.

I co-edit the book series Cambridge Elements in Arctic and Antarctic Studies, which publishes short monographs on a wide range of topics—from history and literary studies to anthropology and political science—concerning both polar regions, the Arctic and the Antarctic. I am also an Associate Editor of Sibirica, an international journal devoted to the study of the history and cultures of Siberia.

I am currently working on three book projects. The first, a short monograph, examines the comparative intellectual and environmental history of the Arctic’s transformation into a nuclearized and militarized region. It explores how nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste disposal, forced displacement, scientific expertise, and secrecy closed off access to some Arctic territories and severed the ties between Indigenous and local communities and their homelands.

The second project explores the history of Siberian Indigenous activists, writers, and artists who developed distinctive aesthetic and intellectual frameworks for articulating their knowledge and perceptions of the world. At the same time, they served as intermediaries in public spheres and in their interactions with scholars and metropolitan intellectuals, mediating and translating that knowledge within the context of Soviet modernity. I recently presented on one such fascinating figure from the Novaya Zemlya archipelago and am currently finalizing a journal article on this topic.

In the third project, I collaborate with anthropologist David Anderson of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, to analyze the intellectual trajectory of one of the most controversial concepts in the social sciences—ethnicity (or ethnos), known in Russian as ėtnos, in French as ethnie, in Chinese as mínzú, and in Japanese as minzoku. Through the lives and works of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, whose academic and political activities spanned late Imperial Russia, France, Nazi Germany, Nationalist China, and Imperial Japan during the interwar period, we examine how their scholarship played a formative role in the development and global circulation of this concept. As a step toward this monograph, we published an article and, together with Svetlana Podrezova of the Pushkin House in Saint Petersburg, a three-volume edition of their materials: letters, field diaries, political pamphlets, and so on.

As part of my community-oriented projects, I located, digitized, and collaboratively edited—together with Nenets artists and knowledge holders—one of the earliest film reels, created by an ethnographic couple among the Nenets in 1929–1930. This film, titled Samoyedic Diary (Nenets: Samoed’ ila’ padar’; Russian: Samodiĭskiĭ dnevnik), is now available on YouTube.

Another collaborative project, titled Voices of Pre-Industrial Siberia, was carried out together with Nenets, Evenki, and Sakha scholars and artists from Siberia, as well as audio archivists in Saint Petersburg, with the aim of digitizing, contextualizing, and sharing a collection of tape recordings of Indigenous peoples of the North. This large and unique collection of Indigenous voices, dating from the 1920s to the 1980s, had never previously been professionally digitized and is now available online. Our team is currently working on an academic article that examines the politics of archiving Indigenous voices and the practices of listening to them.

My academic publications have been covered by a range of outlets, from Siberian Indigenous newspapers such as Nyar”yana Vynder [Nenets: The Red Tundra Man], to The Lantern, to Museum Journal, to The Atlantic.

At Ohio State, I teach courses on Indigenous Siberia, Russian colonialism, Arctic and northern literature, the Soviet space program, the cultural history of espionage, and the cultural history of science and technology.

I welcome students interested in empire and colonialism, the production and politics of knowledge, human-environment relations, nuclear energy and contaminated environments, Indigenous studies, the politics of archives and museums, literature, and the cultural histories of Russia, Siberia, and the Arctic.

My research has been supported by international grants and fellowships from the Center for Northeast Asian Studies at Tohoku University (Japan), the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at The Ohio State University (US), the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the European Research Council, The Leverhulme Trust (UK), the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University (US), the Research Council of Norway, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), the Modern Endangered Archives Program (Arcadia Fund, US), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (US), among others.

Monographs

[under contract]: Arzyutov, Dmitry V. Theories from the Underground: Subterranean Beings, Siberian Indigenous Peoples, and Soviet Concepts of Ethnogenesis. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. [Series: Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology]

Selected edited collections (for full list see my CV)

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., Sergei A. Kan, Laura Siragusa, and Aleksander Pershai, eds. 2026. Paper Bridges Between Franz Boas and Russian Anthropology. In two volumes. University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society. [publisher’s website]

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., Igor Krupnik, and Veronika Trotter, guest eds. 2026. “De-Centering Siberian Museum Anthropology: Transnational Histories of Indigenous Collections” Museum Anthropology. Virtual special issue.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. and Karina Lukin, guest eds. 2023. “Entangled Indigenous Historicities from the Eurasian North.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. 47(3) [available online]

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., David G. Anderson, and Svetlana V. Podrezova, eds. 2021-2022. Puteshestviia cherez sibirskuiu step’ i taĭgu k antropologicheskim kontseptsiiam: ėtnoistoriia Sergeia i Elizavety Shirokogorovykh [= Journeys through the Siberian Steppes and Taiga to Anthropological Concepts: The Ethno-history of Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff]. In three volumes. Moscow: Indrik. [available online] [in Russian]

Anderson, David G., Dmitry V. Arzyutov, and Sergei S. Alymov, eds. 2019. Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. [available online]

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., Sergei S. Alymov, and David G. Anderson, eds. 2014. Ot klassikov k marksizmu: soveshchanie ėtnografov Moskvy i Leningrada (5–11 aprelia 1929 g.) [= From Classics to Marxism: The Meeting of Ethnographers from Moscow and Leningrad (5-11 April 1929)]. Saint Petersburg: Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera). [available online] [in Russian]

Selected peer reviewed articles and book chapters (for full list see my CV)

In press. Arzyutov, Dmitry V. “Missionaries as ‘Ethnographers,’ Ethnographers as ‘Missionaries’: Indigenous Religious Resistance and the Politics of Knowledge in the Siberian Altai.” Slavic Review

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., Veronika Trotter, and Vera Solovyeva. 2026. “Spinning the Past Forward: Recording, Archiving, and (Re-)Listening to Siberian Phonograph Cylinders from the Jesup North Pacific Expedition.” Museum Anthropology 49 (2): e70044. https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.70044.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., and Laura Siragusa. 2025. “Writing Without Letters: Inscriptive Practices in Trans-Indigenous Arctic Literacy History.” Slavic and East European Journal. 69(4): 475–93.

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. and David G. Anderson. 2024. “Proxies and Partial Connections in an Anthropologist’s Archive.” The British Journal for the History of Science 57(3): 389-405. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000815.

Losey, Robert J., Tatiana Nomokonova, Dmitry V. Arzyutov, Andrei V. Gusev, Andrei V. Plekhanov, Natalia V. Fedorova, and David G. Anderson. 2021. “Domestication as Enskilment: Harnessing Reindeer in Arctic Siberia.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 28 (1): 197–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-020-09455-w.

Siragusa, Laura, and Dmitry Arzyutov. 2020. “Nothing Goes to Waste: Sustainable Practices of Re-Use among Indigenous Groups in the Russian North.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 43 (April): 41–48. doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2020.02.001.

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.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. 2018. “Voices of the Land, Samizdat, and Visionary Politics: On the Social Life of Altai Narratives.” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 57 (1): 38–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/10611959.2018.1470426.

Arzyutov, Dmitry V., and Sergei A. Kan. 2017. “The Concept of the ‘Field’ in Early Soviet Ethnography: A Northern Perspective.” Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies. 16 (1): 31–74. https://doi.org/10.3167/sib.2017.160103.

Awards, fellowships, and grants (last five years, for full list see my CV)

2027: Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University, Japan.

2026: Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University.

2024-2025: ASC Departmental Student Research Program Grants, the Ohio State University. Project title: The Right to Write: Documenting Minoritized Literatures and Cultures in Russia (with Dr Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner).

2024: Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at the Ohio State University (East European and Eurasian Online Curricular Module Development Program). Project title: Tales from Home: Two Siberians on Siberia’s History, Culture, and the Environment (with Michelle Verbitskaya).

2023-2025: The Modern Endangered Archives Program / UCLA Library granting program funded by Arcadia Fund (US). Project title: Voices of Pre-Industrial Siberia: The Collections of the Pushkin House (with Drs. David Anderson, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Svetlana Podrezova, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Saint Petersburg, Russia).

2020: The 2019 Ab Imperio Award for the best peer-reviewed article in new imperial history and history of diversity in Northern Eurasia, up to the late twentieth century. For the article “The Etnos Archipelago: Sergei M. Shirokogoroff and the Life History of a Controversial Anthropological Concept” (Anderson and Arzyutov 2019).