Intersections of History and Literature in Central Asia

A series of workshops -- generously funded by Matthew Nimetz -- meant to help shape literary scholarship within the discipline of Central Asian studies.  Two workshops have already taken place at AUCA in the summer of 2014 and the fall of 2017. CASI held a Literature Week in parallel with the second workshop in which participants presented their research to the broader AUCA community. Workshop participants have also published numerous articles as a result of the seminar, including a special section on the Kazakh poet Abai that appeared in the Journal of Eurasian Studies this year. In an effort to highlight the profile of the workshop, participants will be presenting a series of roundtables and panels at the upcoming CESS conference in Pittsburg in 2018. CASI is also working with members of the last workshop to shape their submissions into two groups of papers (4-5 each). These will be submitted as "special sections" to Representations and to a periodical in the field of Central Asian studies, such as the Social and Economic History of the Orient. CASI will be devoting the remaining funding available to the workshop to supporting the latter effort. It will reconvene several of the participants at the end of summer or early fall to review and polish submissions on the theme “Empires of Paper.”