Dr. Nadia Mamontova is a social anthropologist and human geographer whose interdisciplinary research bridges social anthropology, human geography, history, language documentation, political ecology, critical toponymy, and Indigenous studies. Over the past eighteen years, she has conducted extensive research and collaborative work with Indigenous communities across the Russian Arctic, Siberia, and the Far East, including fourteen field expeditions. Her scholarship is grounded in long-term ethnographic engagement and community-based research methodologies.
Prior to her arrival in the UK, Dr. Mamontova held positions at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies in Finland and at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Until 2021, she worked as Lead Research Fellow in the Anthropology of Extractivism project at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2020, she completed a DPhil in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, following a PhD in History (Social Anthropology) from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences. She also holds MA degrees in Social Anthropology from the Russian State University for the Humanities (2009) and in Altaic Studies from the University of Helsinki (2015), and spent an academic year as an Erasmus student at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin.
Dr. Mamontova has led or contributed to more than a dozen interdisciplinary projects focused on Indigenous language documentation and preservation, resource and environmental governance, critical and Indigenous cartographies, extractivism, and Indigenous heritage and museum collections. Her research has been supported by major funding bodies, including the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the British Academy, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Russian Foundation for Humanities, and the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies. She has also received funding from the Canadian Research Strategic Initiatives Grant and the Society of Endangered Languages at the University of Cologne for her work developing a community-engaged toponymic platform, providing Indigenous Evenk communities with access to their cartographic and toponymic heritage.
She has also participated in several projects focused on Arctic Indigenous peoples, including Dynamics of Circumpolar Land Use and Ethnicity (CLUE): Social Impacts of Policy and Climate Change (U.S. National Science Foundation, PI Prof. Hugh Beach), which examined land use change and resilience among Indigenous Arctic populations; The Resource Curse in the Circumpolar Areas (PI Prof. Dmitry Funk); and Documentation of Endangered Languages (PI Dr. Olga Kazakevich).
Dr. Mamontova has published extensively across social anthropology, political geography, Indigenous studies, sociolinguistics, and environmental humanities, including 28 first-author or sole-author publications. Her recent article, “The Nuclear Anthropocene of the Soviet North: Cold War Vernacular Collecting and Mining Uranium, and Its Legacies” (Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 82, 2023, pp. 38–48), received the 2025 BASEES Women’s Forum Article Prize.
Her expertise has been recognised through invited advisory roles with the joint programme of the Council of Europe and the Russian Ministry for Regional Development, as well as Exxon Neftegas Ltd., where she served as a specialist on Indigenous issues and community engagement.