Zhaina Meirkhan

Zhaina Meirkhan is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Michigan specializing in modern China and Soviet Central Asian history. She is a fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, a Mary Malcomson Raphael‍ Scholar, and a Graduate Student Associate at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia. She is one of the coordinators of the Central Asian Studies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop. Her research examines the interconnected histories of mobility, migration, and displacement across Soviet Central Asia and China, as well as diaspora formation in other parts of the world during the 20th century. Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, family narratives, and memory, her dissertation examines how the collapse of pastoral livelihoods after the 1930s Kazakh famine altered migration patterns among the Kazakh people. It further examines how cross-border migration emerged as a survival strategy and how displaced families reconstructed their lives and communities within Kazakh society in Xinjiang and among Kazakh diaspora communities globally.

More broadly, her work examines the relationship between state power and everyday life, particularly how communities experience, navigate, and remember periods of profound political and social transformation in Soviet Central Asia and China during the 20th century. By bringing together histories of famine, nuclear history, migration, family narratives, and memory, her research seeks to recover experiences often absent from official archives and to situate Kazakh history within broader conversations about mobility, empire, and transnational history.

Beyond her research, Zhaina is committed to teaching, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public engagement with Chinese and Soviet Central Asian histories. She has helped organize academic workshops and events that bring together scholars and students working across Central Asian, Eurasian studies, and Chinese history. She is interested in making the regional histories accessible to audiences beyond academia.

During the fellowship, Zhaina intends to broaden her understanding of the literature on nuclear history by conducting research using online archival sources and oral histories with survivors and their descendants in nuclear communities at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. This research will focus on how local communities adapted to and resisted the nuclear experiments, how knowledge circulated amid restricted information, and on comparing the Kazakhstani case with other Cold War nuclear sites in the Soviet Union and beyond to examine how states managed to keep and spread effective knowledge so the communities stayed intact in different ways. Finally, she will refine the project and incorporate this paper into her dissertation. Zhaina's primary aim is to develop this research into a publishable article on life in militarized, nuclear-oriented landscapes in Kazakhstan.