My research explores how environmental change, imperial intervention, and displacement reshape relationships between people, place, and the more-than-human in the Middle Caucasus, and how these shifts influence memory, identity, belonging, and connection to place over time.
Rowan Baker is a doctoral student in Anthropology and Environment at Yale University. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research across the Middle Caucasus, her work examines how environmental change, imperial intervention, and physical displacement transform relationships between people, place, and the more-than-human. Her dissertation explores how these shifts influence historical memory, identity, and place-based connection, with particular attention to how they alter mutually constitutive social and ecological relationships across generations.
More broadly, her research is motivated by the practical challenge of understanding the conditions under which environmental change may contribute to either cooperation or division. Informed by prior experience in research and policy, she is particularly interested in what relationships between humans and the more-than-human may reveal about the ways communities navigate histories of belonging, displacement, and conflict, as well as the social and environmental conditions that support more constructive forms of engagement with shared histories, lived realities, and possible futures.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Rowan served as a Fulbright Research Grantee to Georgia, a Policy Fellow with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Research Director of the Stanford U.S.-Russia Forum, and an International Fellow with CRRC Georgia. She holds degrees from UCLA and Yale.