Julia Herzberg (PhD in Eastern European Cultures and Languages 2011, Bielefeld University) is Professor of Eastern and Central European History and the History of Premodern Russia at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She has published widely on the autobiographical writing of peasants in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. More recently, her research has focused on the environmental history of Central Eastern Europe and Russia. She is working on an environmental history of frost in Russia that examines the social and cultural aspects of the country’s harsh climate. She is most centrally interested in the cultural implications of bodily afflictions.

As a POLY Fellow, she worked on a book project titled Vigilance and Abstinence: Conflicts over Fasting in Early Modern Russia (Vigilanz und Verzicht. Konflikte um das Fasten im Russland der Vormoderne). This work analyses practices of abstinence in the polycentric and ethnically diverse world of early modern Russia, with an emphasis on how those practices were monitored by secular and religious authorities, medical experts, and other individual actors.