Tom Cinq-Mars Awarded Weyerhaeuser Fellowship

Tom Cinq-Mars was awarded the Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Forest History Fellowship from the Forest History Society (FHS). A non-profit depository dedicated to forest and conservation history located here in Durham, the FHS offers the Weyerhaeuser Fellowship annually to a Duke graduate student pursuing an historical research project treating land use, forestry, or the environment, broadly construed. Students enrolled in any Duke graduate program are eligible to apply. Tom will use the Fellowship stipend, consisting of $10,000, to support a year of dissertation research abroad in Russia planned to begin in early 2016. His project, titled "Fossil Fuel Communism: The Druzhba Oil Pipeline and the Making of the Eastern Bloc, 1948-1994," explores the construction of the longest oil pipeline in the world (roughly 5,500 kilometers), and its effects on the formation of socialist political economies. To date, Tom has confirmed through archival sources that the pipeline, still in use today, was built through 450 kilometers of undeveloped forestland in the USSR alone. Notably, this year marks the second year in a row that a PhD student in the History Department received the Fellowship.