Heather Sonntag is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Languages & Cultures of Asia at UW-Madison. Her research combines interests in Central Asian cultural history, encounter, and early photography.

Her doctoral thesis contextualizes the first photographic representations of Central Asia bound in elite albums, dating from the late 1850s to the late 1870s. Her project both situates the albums in a global phenomenon of imperial album production and examines their content as overlapping and interconnected visual narratives of Russian conquest in the colonial territory known as Turkestan. The regions and populations represented among the content are located in the modern states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia, western China and western Siberia. Her work benefits from: the disciplines of History, Art History, Anthropology; the fields of Central Asia and Slavic Area Studies, and Visual Culture; and an internship at the Library of Congress-Prints and Photographs Division (summer 2005), where she translated the captions, titles and foreword of the Turkestan Album for the online catalog and digital preservation project.

Her PhD project emerges from her MA thesis (2003) on the Russian Orientalist painter, Vasily Vereshchagin, and his appropriation of photographic props from albums she will discuss in the doctoral thesis. She has a background in Asian Studies from the University of Puget Sound, where she participated in the Pacific Rim/Asia Study Travel Program in 1993-1994. She hails from Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.