VINCENT M. ARTMAN, vartman@ku.edu 

Vincent M. Artman is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Kansas. His research interests revolve around the role of religion in the modern public sphere, in particular how it intersects with national identity. His dissertation research seeks to understand the conflation of religious and national identities in Central Asia implicit in the common – and frequently taken-for-granted – adage that "to be Kyrgyz is to be Muslim” by focusing on the role of Islam in the Kyrgyz collective memory. He is currently in the process of collecting data for this project, and his fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan will be completed at the end of December, 2014. In addition to his work on Central Asia, Artman has also published in the journal Geopolitics on the territorial and biopolitical aspects of passportization in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and he has a chapter on religion and the state in the forthcoming Brill Vocabulary for the Study of Religion, co-authored with Dr. Alexander Diener. He is also a co-author on an article, currently under review, which proposes a framework for understanding the process of territorial cleansing.