Blog

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Date of Birth

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April 19, 1980

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Date of Death

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June 16, 2021

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Location

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Santa Cruz, California

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Cause of Death

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Amniotic Fluid Embolism

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Who She Was

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Her Story

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=””]Maya Peterson, a leading young scholar in the fields of environmental, Russian, and Central Asian history, died tragically in childbirth on June 16, 2021, alongside her daughter Priya Luna. At the time of her death, she served as associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she had worked since 2012. With her death, we have lost a brilliant researcher and one of the genuinely good people in the world; many of us have lost not just a colleague, but a friend.

Born in 1980, Maya was raised in western Massachusetts, where her parents worked at Mt. Holyoke College. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 2002 with a degree in history and continued to earn first an MA in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian studies and a PhD in history at Harvard, completing her dissertation in 2011 under the supervision of Terry Martin. Her first book, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2019) was a finalist for the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s prize for best work in history and the humanities. She was also the author of several articles in leading journals, including this one. Her newest project, on kumys (fermented mare’s milk) cures and the steppe environment, promised to hit still greater heights.

Maya’s scholarship was distinguished by many of the same traits that made her such an unforgettable person: curiosity, openness, wit, and indefatigable energy. Building on the achievements of the first cohort of Western scholars to explore Central Asian archives, she used the opportunities for travel and language study open to scholars of our generation to great effect. Pipe Dreams was the product of dogged research in twelve archives and made use of her outstanding facility in Russian and German, as well as her study of local Central Asian languages. It is a genuinely groundbreaking study of tsarist and Soviet attempts to impose their vision of modernity on the Central Asian landscape through mastery of its rivers. Irrigation projects loomed large in both tsarist and Soviet aspirations for the future of their Central Asian territories—only when piped and channeled to the appropriate location could water support the large-scale cultivation of cotton, the cash crop on which their future depended.

Maya demonstrates startling continuity between imperial and Soviet attempts to master Central Asian rivers, and intriguing parallels between the Central Asian case and histories of irrigation in Australia, North Africa, and the American West. Her story is deeply human and wonderfully alive to contingency and irony. She shows, for example, that while imperial and Soviet officials sought to master the environment, they often discovered that they could not bend it to their will, as soil salination and mosquitoes disrupted their best-laid plans. Local Central Asian actors found space for cooperation and resistance on irrigation projects, depending on the specific circumstances, even though Central Asia’s relationship with Russia remained fundamentally colonial even in the early Soviet period. Advocates of modernization through cotton monoculture were not deluded dupes, but whatever their intentions, they still helped to unleash a process whose devastating human and environmental costs, most famously the desiccation of the Aral Sea, are still being felt today. It is a stylish, prodigiously researched book that made her scholarly reputation and should enjoy a broad readership for decades.

But Maya was, too, a sparkling and wonderful person. A lover of animals and wild places, she was an avid hiker and climber—and a brilliant companion to have while exploring a new place, as many of her friends can attest. She was a warm, funny, supportive colleague for so many of us in the field, always ready to share advice, to commiserate on the challenges of work in a new archive or balancing the many demands of the tenure track, and to give thoughtful and generous comments on others’ work. To spend time with her was practically a guarantee of experiencing something new and exciting, whether it was a different perspective on a thorny intellectual problem, an interesting restaurant, or a beautiful spot to run. In this, too, her sudden and tragic passing leaves many of us bereft.

She is survived by her parents, Mark and Indira, and her partner, A. Marm Kilpatrick; she is sadly missed by friends and fellow scholars the world over.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_column_text css=”” el_class=”profile-links-header”]

Support Her Family

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Memorials

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Articles

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