In fall 2025, Kamal Kariem will begin an Assistant Professor position in the Anthropology Department at Bates College. In the 2024-2025 academic year, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College, where he formerly was Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Russian. His research and writing center on global Indigeneities and comparative empires as these intersect with nature protection and have been supported by the Charles Gaius Bolin Fellowship at Williams College, the Stephen F. Cohen–Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Fellowship Program, Title VIII Fellowship for Language Study, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University.

At Bates, Kariem will continue to work on his book project, tentatively titled Believing Conservation: Hunting, Protecting Nature, and Altering Indigeneity on the Bikin River, in which he demonstrates how the environment becomes a site of contestation over state belonging among the Udege through conflicting mobilizations of late Imperial Russian and Soviet histories. By leveraging archival data on understudied histories from late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, Believing Conservation demonstrates how late imperial officials and Soviet bureaucrats found uses for Indigeneity as a social formation. Complementing insights from this data with ethnographic research from 2019 – 2021 in Russia’s Primorskii krai, Kariem explores how the Udege, a legally recognized Indigenous people, conflictingly relate to both the role of hunting as a part of protecting nature over time and the formation of Bikin National Park. He offers the concept of conservation futures to reframe this conflict from one between those for or against protecting nature into one in which different timelines of conservation and nature protection shape how the Udege connect themselves to protecting nature in the past, present, and future. Invoking late imperial and Soviet pasts, these timelines of protecting nature are mobilized as a part of his interlocutors’ citizenship and belonging in Russia today. He is also excited to teach and engage with students at Bates, especially teaching his course Indigeneity Today: Comparative Indigenous Identities in the US and Russia and involving students in research.