History alum John Seitz wins Karas Award

Dr. John Seitz, a graduate of Iowa State’s Ph.D. program in Rural, Agricultural, Technological, and Environmental History, received a 2021 Karas Award for Outstanding Dissertation. Every year, the Graduate College gives this accolade to two students with superior dissertations in rotating disciplines.

Seitz’s dissertation, “Science and the steppe: Agronomists, nomads, and the settler colony on the Kazakh steppe, 1881-1917,” explores the transformation of the Kazakh steppe from an area largely populated by nomadic people to one of the world’s leaders in wheat production. To complete this work, Seitz spent 11 months combing through archives in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Seitz

“Kazakhstan is a relatively recently independent country. It was part of the Soviet Union until 1991. Until that point, history was very ideological,” said Seitz, who is now an assistant professor of history at Tennessee Wesleyan University. “I was able to work with other historians of Kazakhstan for whom this subject was a very present passion, and they had felt for so long that their history had been hidden or miswritten. I got to work with historians to tell this story, based on archival documents instead of just the writings of Lenin.”

Although Seitz began researching his dissertation thinking that it would be about Russian scientists and agronomists arriving in the Kazakh steppe and giving expert advice to natives, his findings were different.

“What I actually found was they came in with all these ideas of food to grow there, and they actually didn’t have a clue because the environment was different than they thought. The advice they were giving was actually similar to many things that nomads do,” he said.

After unsuccessfully attempting to persuade indigenous Kazakhs to give up their nomadism in favor of sedentary agriculture, Russian officials instead brought peasant settlers from Russia to the Kazakh steppe.

“The scientists looked down on these people, but what I began to find is that just like they had adopted some of the Kazakh ways of surviving in this environment, and later they did the same things with the peasants,” Seitz said. “This wasn’t a story of experts actually being experts; they themselves were having to learn from people they certainly didn’t look up to.”

Officials hoped to transform Russian settlers into farmers in the Kazakh steppe so they could exploit its agricultural resources. To achieve this, they utilized the newest production methods and technologies, such as grain silos, farm machinery stations, and grain elevators. Although their undertaking did not go exactly according to plan, they were ultimately successful in transforming the environment and society of the steppe.

“They got a foothold for sedentary agriculture that by the Soviet period became the dominant form,” Seitz said. “There are basically no nomads in Kazakhstan now, and instead, there are large wheat farms. While this is a complex story, it’s also a tragically simple story of dispossession.”

Before starting his dissertation, Seitz had been aware of the ways that sedentary agriculture and peasant settlement had made it more it more difficult for nomads to move from place to place, and he knew that agricultural advances came at a cost to indigenous people. One of the challenges of writing his dissertation was telling the story of dispossession as one that was unfair, while also trying to understand the nuances and complexities.

“Research into more efficient crops allows people to have more food and do less work,” Seitz said. “But it isn’t free.”

Another challenge Seitz faced was realizing that his writing was not going to be perfect, and that although he knew a great deal about his dissertation topic, he did not know everything about the process of fitting his work together. He turned to his major professor, Dr. James Andrews, and other professors in the Department of History on the days when he was struggling.

“I would advise other students to be open about their struggles. Everyone has bad days when they’re writing a dissertation,” he said. “On the whole, the good ones usually outnumber the bad, and at the end it’s a great feeling. You get to create something that’s yours and share it with people who are interested in it.”

Andrews, who supervised the writing of Seitz’s dissertation, was one of the faculty who recommended him for the Karas Award.

“Dr. Seitz is a superb scholar, highly organized, and very disciplined professionally, and he carries out academic tasks he is assigned with the utmost care and thoughtfulness,” Andrews wrote in his recommendation letter.

When Seitz learned that he had been selected for the award, he was honored to be chosen among a group of talented graduate students and proud of Iowa State’s Department of History.

“When I came to Iowa State, I finally found my people who were interested talking about agriculture and the environment. It was great to have people who shared my passion for learning about agricultural history,” he said. “I’m really excited to put a feather in the cap of what I think is a really excellent department.”