Elizabeth (Betty) Banks is a global historian of the Soviet Union and twentieth century Africa, with thematic interests in gender, development, and the environment. She received her PhD from New York University and joined Edinburgh as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow following an interlude at the European University Institute in Florence. She is one of the editors of “The African Soviet Modern”, a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2021), and the author of “The Ruble Lever", in the Journal of Global History (2024). She is currently finalizing her first book, which examines connections between the USSR and Mozambique from the 1960s through the fall of socialism in both states, and beginning a new project examining industrial fishing during the cold war, titled Cold War Cod: Environments, Technologies, and the Politics of Fishing.
Her new research project, Cold War Cod: Environments, Technologies, and the Politics of Fishing is a global environmental history of Soviet fishing during the late twentieth century. Looking through the lens of the Soviet case, the work uncovers the interlinked economic and environmental consequences of the worldwide drive for fishing from the 1950s onwards, and the legacies of fishing in these decades that continue to affect our lives and environments. Research at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has shed light on the intersection between Soviet scientific research and global efforts to increase access to fish products, while planned research in Latvia, Lithuania and Shetland will illuminate how the Soviet maritime empire in fishing was experienced on the ground (and on the water). Integrating environmental history as an orientation and way of seeing illuminates the ecological destruction the industry ultimately caused, while attention to the movement of the fish in the backdrop of human activity can expose alternative geographies of Soviet power. Following her previous research on the impact Soviet presence during African decolonization, the analysis is acutely aware of the intersection of cold war and global decolonization, and how changing patterns of resource extraction intersected with ambitions for new anti-imperial futures. Finally, through its examination of industrial over-fishing in the past, Cold War Cod can offer historical perspectives to current discussions over the origin of our food, the sustainability of the seas, and environmental degradation.