On a leave of absence from 2023 to 2024

I’m Jesse Mikhail Wesso from Illinois. I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department working with Adrienne Edgar on histories of environment, mobility and nation in Kazakhstan.

My research examines the Virgin Lands campaign to rapidly expand and reform agricultural production in the Soviet Union, with a specific focus on collective farmers in Kazakhstan from 1953 to 1963. In this period millions of hectares were plowed up in Siberia and the Kazakh steppes, while hundreds of thousands of in-migrants, largely from European Russia, moved to Kazakhstan to work for the campaign, which occasionally led to ethnic conflicts on the farms. A large-scale experiment in corn farming followed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1955 Iowa visit, and corn plantings increased five times over, to about 16% of total acreage, in two years. Collective farms specializing in producing pigs also became increasingly common. Yet some Kazakhs mistrusted growing corn, or felt aggrieved for being asked to render pork. My studies explain why these agricultural reform movements to introduce pigs, corn and in-migration were unsuccessful in the Khrushchev period and explores how, in response to the Virgin Lands program, Kazakhs worked to establish and maintain a blend of Soviet and semi-nomadic social practices.

Corn, Pigs and Settlers: Alienation and the Opening of Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, 1953–1963

• History of Soviet Central Asia
• History of Modern Europe
• History of the Middle East
• Religious Studies

• History 2B, World History
• History 4B, Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• History 2C, World History from 1700 to the Present
• History 4C, History of Modern Europe from 1650 to the Present
• WRIT 2, Academic Writing

• 2022 Peer reviewer, Undergraduate Journal of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• 2022 Webinar host, “Active Educating for TAs,” with Dr. Jarett Henderson, University of California, Santa Barbara 
• 2021 Host, Undergraduate Panel for History Department TAs, 8 November, University of California, Santa Barbara 
• Peer reviewer, Undergraduate Journal of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• 2020 Peer reviewer, Undergraduate Journal of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Roundtable participant, “History Labs for Active Learning,” with Jarett Henderson, Giulia Giamboni and Bradford Fried, Engaging Teaching Symposium, Departments of History and Education, University of California, Santa-Barbara
• Fellow, Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute (CESSI), University of Wisconsin-Madison