Julia Herzberg holds a professorship in History of Russia / East Central Europe in Pre-Modern Times at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich since October 2016. In her project “Frost. Cold as a Cultural Challenge in Russia,” she questioned the changing subjective perceptions, social practices, and discourses that determined how frost, snow, and ice were dealt with from the early modern period into the Soviet era. She is also working on a monograph that examines abstinence and fasting as a practice and object of political, medical, and religious contestation in Russia. Julia Herzberg studied German, history and Russian in Cologne, Volgograd and Moscow. She received her doctorate from Bielefeld University with a study of peasant autobiography between the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union. After her doctoral studies, she worked as a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich and, since October 2013, as an researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Neuere und Osteuropäische Geschichte der Universität Freiburg.