From 14th to 22nd of October Sochi hosted one of the most ambitious events of the 21st century – the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Charles Shaw, a professor from the Central European University, and Gabriel McGuire, a professor at Nazarbayev University, will be giving a talk on Friday, on their school’s respective graduate programs. They will also talk more generally about how students can best prepare themselves to apply to grad school.

Thanks to generous funding provided by Matthew Nimetz, CASI has held a follow-on workshop this year to the seminar it conducted in 2014 on the “Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia.” The workshop was held on the campus of AUCA in Bishkek from 30 November to 2 December 2017.

SPEAKER: Ali İğmen, California State University
Abstract: Nazim Hikmet became an iconic figure in his homeland Turkey only decades after his death in 1965. As a son of an Ottoman civil servant father and a painter mother, Hikmet is reflective of a generation of young Ottoman subjects who learned about and struggled with modernity, nationalism, and communism. 

 
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SPEAKER: Charles Shaw, Central European University
Abstract: What was Nasriddin afandi, the trickster of the Islamicate world, doing at the heart of Soviet culture during its war with Nazi Germany? This talk discusses Nasreddin in Bukhara (1943), the last film of Soviet director Yakov Protazanov, which was filmed in evacuation Uzbekistan and starred an array of Soviet acting elites.

Literature Week is a part of CASI’s Workshop on Literature and History. Supported by a generous contribution from Matthew Nimetz, the aim of the workshop is to create a community of junior scholars and advanced graduate students committed to studying literature and to applying literary tools and methodologies to the study of literary art in the Central Asian past. 

 
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SPEAKER: Diana Kudaibergenova
Short abstract: The understanding of regional locality and, moreover, of regional art and cultural production poses important questions, namely, What is Central Asia and Where is Central Asia? “Central Asia” is a multi-layered jigsaw that appears as a fairly simple and well-defined but in reality as very complex yet very exciting “lively space”. 

Literature Week is a part of CASI’s Workshop on Literature and History. Supported by a generous contribution from Matthew Nimetz, the aim of the workshop is to create a community of junior scholars and advanced graduate students committed to studying literature and to applying literary tools and methodologies to the study of literary art in the Central Asian past.

Within Erasmus+ partnership agreement AUCA hosted the visit of staff and faculty of Philips Marburg University, Germany on October 25 – 30 and November 15 – 22, 2017.

CASI is holding a follow-on workshop this year to the seminar it conducted in 2014 on the “Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia.” The workshop will be held on the campus of AUCA in Bishkek from 30 November to 2 December 2017.