CASI workshops

2022 Vernacular Cultures Workshop

Paolo Sartori, a respected scholar of Central Asia at the Institute of Iranian Studies in Vienna, invited six of the founding members of CASI’s History and Literature workshop to a conference in early May 2022 to explore processes of vernacularization in Central Asia and to examine what he terms ‘the entanglements of local systems of knowledge with competing ideologies of sovereignty, writing cultures, practices of communal organization and visions of the self.’ CASI co-organized the event and coordinated the participation of workshop members. Svetlana Jacquesson, a scholar in residence at CASI, represented the Institute at the conference. 

The two-day event encompassed a broad range of case studies, including a paper on the complex poetics of geographic displacement in the Russophone writing of contemporary Central Asia. The conference established a partnership between CASI and the Vienna Institute and will harness the talent of the History and Literature Workshop for a joint publication in a peer-reviewed journal such as Ab Imperio or the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 

Program

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/Institute/IFI/PDF/Veranstaltungen/2022/programme_localmodern_2022_neu.pdf

Abstracts

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/Institute/IFI/PDF/Veranstaltungen/2022/abstracts_vernacular_cultures_2022_neu.pdf

2021 Bishkek Workshop

‘Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia’ 27 November – 29 November 2021

Participants in the 2021 meeting finalized a series of essays they intend to submit to the journal Representations as a ‘special section.’ Representations was premised on the idea that studying literature in historical contexts offers a window into how a culture, in a particular moment or time, represents reality to itself. Workshop participants are replanting this notion in Central Asian contexts, examining the distinct ways in which Central Asian literatures assembled reality in the region’s diverse imperial and Soviet settings. 

Literature Week

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.

2021 Nashville Workshop

Intersections of Uzbek History, Literature, and Culture’ 5 June – 7 June 2021 Nashville, Tennessee, USA

AUCA faculty member Christopher Fort headed the Nashville workshop together with Claire Roosien, a scholar of Uzbek literature starting a tenure-track position at Yale. Focused on Uzbek history and literature and involving four scholars from Uzbekistan, the workshop provided a forum for innovative research on questions of Soviet subjectivity, post-colonialism, and bodily autonomy and generated numerous plans for joint panel and paper presentations at conferences on Central 

Participants

Donohon Abdugafurova

Alisher Khaliyarov

Jakhongir Azimov

Zukhra Kasimova

Christopher Fort

Claire Roosien

Program

2017 Workshop

‘Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia’, 30 November – 2 December

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.

The aim of the workshop was to help create of 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. Our hope is that such a community will have a determining impact on the shape of literary studies within the discipline in the next decade and make literature something other than a means to advance the social and political approaches dominant in the field. 

There were 13 participants in total in this year’s workshop, including advanced graduate students and junior scholars from some of the most prestigious universities in the United States and Europe. We were also pleased to welcome Professor Ali Igmen. The current President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, he is also the author of Speaking Soviet with an Accent, his study of culture and power in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Together with Svetlana Jaquesson, the head of CASI, Professor Igmen was acting as an outside reader, providing commentary and critique to the papers submitted to the workshop.

Literature Week

Though the 2017 History and Literature Workshop was closed to the public, CASI offered public lectures in the days immediately before and after the workshop in a series entitled ‘Literature Week.’ There were five public lectures in total:

November 28, 2017, Diana Kudaibergenova, Cambridge University, ‘Imagined Geographies? Contemporary Art of Central Asia’

(https://auca.kg/en/past_seminars/3282/)

November 29, 2017, Charles Shaw, Central European University, ‘Nasriddin in Bukhara and Berlin: Humor, Empire, and the Soviet Union at War’ (https://auca.kg/en/past_seminars/3283/)

December 4, 2017, Naomi Caffee, University of California, ‘Russophone Literature: Transnational Writing in the ‘Wide Russian World’ (https://auca.kg/en/past_seminars/3285/)

December 4, 2017, Gabriel McGuire, Nazarbayev University, ‘A Moveable Feast? The Horse as Companion and as Food in Central Asian Oral Literature’ (https://auca.kg/en/past_seminars/3284/)

December 5, 2017, Christopher Fort, University of Michigan, ‘The Insomniac Bolshevik and the Sleeping Native: Post-coloniality in post-socialist literature of Russia and Uzbekistan’ (https://auca.kg/en/past_seminars/3286/)

2014 Workshop

“Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia”, 29-31 August, 2014, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

The Central Asian Studies Institute (CASI) of the American University of Central Asia held its first history and literature workshop on the AUCA campus on August 29 - 31. The purpose of the workshop was less to develop a narrow, focused theme than to gather a core group of scholars committed to exploring the intersection of history and literature in the Central Asian past. It was CASI’s intent to make this workshop an annual event, providing a forum for an enduring and ongoing examination of the ways in which literature illuminates history and also of the varied ways in which histories and past contexts mark literatures, literary movements, and novels. CASI is particularly interested in literature that contests or deconstructs identities – tribal, religious, ethnic, or national – but the workshop included a range of papers marked by the diversity of their analytical approaches, regional foci, and the historical epochs they examine. The first two days of the conference was devoted to presentations and in-depth discussions of the participants’ essays. The last day was devoted to a broader dialogue and planning session on the organization of future workshops, the goal being to design topics that will help shape and bring into focus emergent themes in the study of history and literature in Central Asia, a broad field of inquiry whose contours are still largely undefined.

Participants