Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Nataliia Laas is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the History Department, Washington University in St. Louis (from fall 2025). She received her PhD in History from Brandeis University in 2022 and then served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University and as a Henry Chauncey Jr. ’57 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University.

Laas is currently working on a book project on waste and socialist environmental thinking titled “A Soviet Consumer Republic: Environmental Citizenship and the Economy of Waste in the Post-WWII Soviet Union.” This work overturns the conventional view that the late Soviet economy was primarily plagued by shortages and shows that the chief difficulty was in fact overproduction and waste. A new challenge of overproducing factories, glutted markets, and the excess of useless commodities provoked popular “waste anxieties” about the overexploitation of natural resources, labor, energy, and capital. By the late 1980s, Soviet society became thoroughly engrossed in radiation- and nitrate-poisoning panics over toxic waste found in food, water, soil, and air. Concerns over waste represented a form of mass environmental thinking under socialism that defined the proper relations between the economy and the environment. Politicized “waste anxieties” prompted the people to defend their consumer and ecological rights and to reimagine their relationship with the socialist state through the concept of environmental citizenship. By uncovering socialist waste, this project urges us to think about modern history as a history of the global movement of toxins, discards, and useless objects. 

Laas’s project was most recently supported by the 2025 Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will spend her fellowship in residence at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society starting from January 2026.