Kearby Chess is a Ph.D. student in Middle East history from Longview, Washington, who studies the climate, science, and agriculture in the late Ottoman Empire. His current research focuses on how three successive generations of Ottoman technocrats and provincial administrators attempted to weather the El Nino-driven droughts of the 1870s, 1890s, and 1910s by applying scientific management principles to provincial agricultural practices.

Kearby earned bachelor’s degrees in History and Anthropology from Washington State University, where he first cultivated an interest in the history of science and agriculture while studying the technological transformation of the postwar Columbia River Plateau. He then received a master’s degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies and completed a thesis exploring imperialism and public health in nineteenth-century Ottoman Iraq under the supervision of the late Walter Andrews. He then attended the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, and served in the United States Army as an Arabic and Turkish translator.