New Books in Central Asian Studies
152 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 16 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Central Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Mark Edele, "Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
March 01, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesStalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two. Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraor...
Albert Baiburin, "The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR" (Polity Press, 2022)
February 23, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesIn The Soviet Passport: The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Polity Press, 2021), Albert Baiburin provides the first in-depth study of the development and uses of the passport, or state identity card, in the former Soviet Union. This richly empirical book will be of great interest not only to students and scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union, but to to anyone interested in the shaping of identity in the modern world. The Soviet Passport was first published in ...
Timothy K. Blauvelt, "Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba" (Routledge, 2021)
February 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourTimothy Blauvelt’s book Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba (Routledge, 2021), explores the complexity of Soviet Nationality Policy and patronage relationships among the Soviet elite by focusing on Nestor Apollonovich Lakoba, the Chairman of the Abkhazian Council of Commissars (Sovnarkom) and Abkhazia's colourful, hyper-connected and Zelig-like local power broker. Small in stature and hard of hearing, Lakoba earned an outsized reputation as a gr...
David L. Hoffmann, "The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2021)
February 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourOver 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, but the collective memory of the conflict remains potently present for the people of the Russian Federation. Professor David Hoffman, editor of a new collection of essays about war memory in “Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia” suggests that this is no accident. Together with an impressive, interdisciplinary roster of academic contributors, Hoffman examines how the current leadership of Russia has put war me...
Putin's Attempt to Hide the Crimes of Stalinism
December 30, 2021 09:00 - 50 minutesFor the past 30 years, a group of Russian scholars have dedicated themselves to uncovering the crimes of Stalinism. Their organization, Memorial, has in that time made great strides in understanding the scale, nature and history of Stalin's repression. On 28 December 2021, Russia's highest court found that Memorial was in violation of the Russian Federation's law regarding "foreign agents" and ordered it to be closed. In this interview, I talked with Benjamin Nathans about Memorial's histor...
David Moon et al., "Place and Nature: Essays in Russian History" (White Horse Press, 2021)
December 08, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourPlace and Nature: Essays in Russian History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through t...
Timur Dadabaev, "Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations: Beyond Empires" (Routledge, 2021)
December 07, 2021 09:00 - 42 minutesThis month we discuss the post-coloniality of Central Asia's International relations with Timur Dadabaev, the author of Decolonizing Central Asian International Relations: Beyond Empire (Routledge, 2021). This book, which brings together new writing and other material previously published by Dadabaev, re-reads the international politics of Central Asia through a very original post-colonial lens. Dadabaev, a Japan-based scholar who hails from the region himself, engages with the existing liter...
Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, "Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia" (Routledge, 2021)
November 10, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourThe Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge, 2021), edited by Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, offers the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary overview of key issues in Central Asian Studies. The 30 chapters by leading and emerging scholars summarise major findings in the field and highlight long-term trends, recent observations, and future developments in the region. The handbook features case studies of all five Central Asian republics and is organised thematically in seve...
Marlene Laruelle, "Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia" (UCL Press, 2021)
November 01, 2021 08:00 - 39 minutesThis month we are delighted to host one of the most important voices in Central Asian Studies worldwide: Professor Marlene Laruelle from George Washington University in DC, to discuss her latest, Open Access book Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia (UCL Press 2021). This is a much-anticipated book, which is going to become the go-to resource for every reader interested in nationalism in Central Asia. Bringing together for the first time Laruelle's articles on Central Asian nationa...
Edward Schatz, "Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia" (Stanford UP, 2021)
October 14, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesI could not think of a better way to start my tenure as host of New Books in Central Asian Studies than discussing Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements & Symbolic Politics in Central Asia (Stanford University Press 2021) with its author, Prof Edward Schatz from the University of Toronto. The book offers a privileged vantage point to assess the political relevance that symbols--in this case those emanated by the United States--continue to hold vis-à-vis attitudes, agendas, and strategies of...
Rano Turaeva and Rustamjon Urinboyev, "Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)
October 11, 2021 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Turaeva and Dr. Urinboyev have brought together a number of studies which explore the daily survival strategies of people within the context of failed states, flourishing informal economies, legal uncertainty, increased mobility, and globalization. As they show, many people who are forced by the circumstances to be innovative and transnational, have found their niches outside formal pr...
Paul Werth, "1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2021)
September 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhen considering pivotal years in Russian history, one naturally thinks of 1861 (the Serf Emancipation), the 1905 Revolution, or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Dr. Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution (Oxford UP, 2021), invites us to reconsider that list of revolutionary years. Werth’s wide-ranging discussion analyzes such subjects as Pushkin’s death and Petr Chadaaev’s criticism of Russia’s past, to the Khiva campaign in which the Russian’s learned all they ever wanted to know about ...
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, "ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
August 16, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThere's been a lot of resurgent interest in the Silk Routes lately, particularly looking at the cultural, political, and economic connections between "East" and "West" that challenge long held narratives of a world that only became interconnected in the last half millennium. Even so, it's been rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions along these same lines of contact. Using manuscr...
Bagila Bukharbayeva, "The Vanishing Generation: Revolution, Religion, and Disappearance in Modern Uzbekistan" (Indiana UP, 2019)
August 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWeaving together personal story and broad analysis, Bagila Burkhabayeva’s The Vanishing Generation: Revolution, Religion, and Disappearance in Modern Uzbekistan (Indiana UP, 2019) deals with the question of Islam and its repression during the period of Islam Karimov’s rule in newly independent Uzbekistan. As witness to the infamous Zhaslyk prison and the 2005 Andijan uprising, Bukharbayeva shares intimate details about Uzbekistan’s use of torture, kidnapping, and imprisonment against perceive...
Riaz Dean, "Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in 19th Century-Central Asia, India and Tibet" (Casemate, 2019)
July 29, 2021 08:00 - 44 minutes“A map is the greatest of all epic poems, its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” --Gilbert Grosvenor The Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India. These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate effor...
Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
July 08, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutesMost of our understanding of the Mongol Empire begins and ends with Chinggis Khan and his sweep across Asia. His name is now included among conquerors whose efforts burn bright and burn out quick: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and so on. Except the story doesn’t end with Chinggis’s death. As Professor Marie Favereau notes in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard University Press: 2021), the empire that he built continued to shape, incubate and grow the political cultures it c...
Marie Favereau, "The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World" (Harvard UP, 2021)
June 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief. Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth centu...
Eric Schluessel, "Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia" (Columbia UP, 2020)
June 04, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt a...
J. Andrew Bush, "Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan" (Stanford UP, 2020)
May 07, 2021 08:00 - 40 minutesBetween Muslims Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan (Stanford UP, 2020) by J. Andrew Bush asks what it means to be Muslim, yet not pious, in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though Islam is often represented in terms of either daily devotion, such as prayer and fasting, or abandonment of faith, there are many who turn away from tradition without departing from Islam. J. Andrew Bush offers us a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, one that invites questions about divine texts and rejects e...
David Rainbow, "Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2019)
May 05, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourConflicting notions about the dynamics of race in Russia and the Soviet Union have made it difficult for both scholars and other observers of the region to understand rising racial tension in Russian and Eurasian societies. Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a Global Context (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019) is an interdisciplinary anthology that brings together historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists of Russia, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the U...
Rustamjon Urinboyev, "Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia," (U California Press, 2020)
May 04, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIn Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Rustam Urinboyev presents rich ethnographic material to reconceptualize how migrants adapt to new legal environment in hybrid political regimes that are neither democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. Focused on Uzbek labor migrants from the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan, Urinboyev’s book makes an important contribution to the literature on migration studies, soc...
David Brophy, "In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty" (Columbia UP, 2021)
April 14, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDavid Brophy's translation of Muhammad Sadiq Kashghari's In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty (Columbia University Press, 2021) represents the first comprehensive translation of the text into English. The translation includes a detailed introduction that not only contextualizes the text and its author, but also describes how it reflects the religious and political landscape of the region in the 18th century. Because it sheds light on the Qing conquest...
Sean R. Roberts, "The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority" (Princeton UP, 2020)
March 24, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThere are currently eleven million Uyghurs living in China, but more than one million are being held in so-called reeducation camps. A cultural genocide is taking place under the guise of counterterrorism. In this profound and explosive book, Sean Roberts shows how China is using the US-led global war on terror to erase and replace Uyghur culture and persecute this ethnic minority in what has become the largest program of mass detention and surveillance in the world. In The War on the Uyghur...
Alexander Morrison, "The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
March 02, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourAlexander Morrison’s study of the conquest of Central Asia offers new perspectives on a topic long obscured by misleading grand narratives. Based on years of research in several countries, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge UP, 2020) not only outright debunks many of these older narratives, but also provides us a detailed military and diplomatic history of the conquest, one which pays specific attention to the contingency and logistics of its multi-stage process. Based on an enor...
Khatchig Mouradian, "The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918" (MSU Press, 2020)
February 09, 2021 09:00 - 56 minutesThe Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Michigan State University Press, 2020) is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. Khatchig Mouradian challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resi...
James Pickett, "Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
January 21, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourJames Pickett's new book, Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth. James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understandin...
David Tobin, "Securing China's Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourGreater interest in what is happening in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang in recent years has generated a proportional need for context, and especially insights into the politics and policies being enacted there and how these interface with local perspectives. For this reason and many others, David Tobin’s Securing China's Northwest Frontier: (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a vital contribution to our understanding of the PRC state-building and narrative-creation efforts which justify proj...
Aubrey Menard, "Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East" (PRH SEA, 2020)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 43 minutesMongolia is sometimes seen as one of the few examples of a successful youth-led revolution, where a 1990 movement forced the Soviet-appointed Politburo to resign. In Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East (Penguin Random House SEA: 2020), Aubrey Menard profiles many of today’s young activists in Mongolia, in a wide array of different areas like pollution, feminism, LGBT rights, and journalism. In this interview, we discuss several of the activists profiled in her book, as wel...
Erica Marat, "The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries" (Oxford UP, 2018)
November 05, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutesIn her book, The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press, 2018), Erica Marat provides an answer to a very important question: “What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force?” Marat looks as specific case studies – in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan – in order to identify and analyze instances where public mobilization challenged the conduct of police offers and their use of violence. In her analys...
Jonathan Lee, "Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present" (Reaktion Books, 2019)
September 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJonathan Lee’s comprehensive study of Afghanistan’s political history in Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present (Reaktion Books) tells the story of the emergence and sometimes surprising longevity of the Afghan state in the face of serious external and internal challenges over the last three centuries. Readers will find a compelling narrative and an important reference for different periods in Afghan history, not to mention a larger thread which looks at the definition (by others) an...
Sean Roberts, "The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn today’s new episode, we speak with Sean Roberts about his brand new book The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). Roberts is the Director of the International Development Studies program at George Washington University. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Southern California and has been studying the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, for some 30 years, including for his Master’s and PhD ...
Iraj Bashiri, "The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan" (Academic Studies Press, 2020)
July 25, 2020 04:00 - 51 minutesIn The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan (Academic Studies Press, 2020) Iraj Bashiri provides an overview of the Civil War in Tajikistan that emerged amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on personal observations, interviews, and a variety of primary and secondary publications, Bashiri places the conflict in a broader historical context, paying careful attention to longstanding tensions that came to the forefront in the early 1990s. These include ideology, regionalism, and, most...
Iraj Bashiri, "The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan" (Lexington Books, 2016)
July 25, 2020 04:00 - 51 minutesIn The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan (Lexington Books) Iraj Bashiri provides an overview of the Civil War in Tajikistan that emerged amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on personal observations, interviews, and a variety of primary and secondary publications, Bashiri places the conflict in a broader historical context, paying careful attention to longstanding tensions that came to the forefront in the early 1990s. These include ideology, regionalism, and, most importantly,...
Diana T. Kudaibergenova, "Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
July 21, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesThe collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Diana T. Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapp...
Scott Levi, "The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia" (U Pittsburgh, 2020)
July 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn his new book, The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th-Century Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), Scott Levi brings new perspectives into the historiography of early Modern Central Asia. Levi reflects on recent scholarship to identify multiple causal factors that contributed to the Bukharan crisis of the 18th century. These include climate change, the global silver trade, the innovation of new gunpowder and weapon technologies, and a number of political transformations ...
Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017)
June 23, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesIn Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the history of cotton agriculture and irrigation in Soviet Central Asia. Based on published sources and archival research conducted in Tashkent, Obertreis’ monograph offers new insights into the nature of Russian Imperial and Soviet statecraft, as well as the technical and ideological motivations behin...
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
June 02, 2020 08:00 - 2 hoursBrian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until t...
Roxann Prazniak, "Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art" (U Hawaii Press 2019)
June 02, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common themes, styles, motifs, and even pigments that circulated across the continents. Drawing on visual as well as textual sources from eight unique locations that spanned between Siena in Italy and Quanzhou in China, Roxann Prazniak maps out in Sudden Appearances an elaborate thirteenth-century network...
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
April 28, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesSlavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary res...
Danielle Ross, "Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia" (Indiana UP, 2020)
April 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn her new book Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (Indiana University Press, 2020), Danielle Ross looks at how the Tatars of Kazan participated in the formation of the Russian empire through their various activities in trade, settlement, clerical work, intellectual culture, and trade. By centering on the Muslims in Kazan, Tatar Empire looks more closely at the role of Tatars in the creation of Russian empire, while simultaneously putting the history of the Volga-...
Maya K. Peterson, "Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
April 16, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesThe drying up of the Aral Sea - a major environmental catastrophe of the late twentieth century - is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when engineers, scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from 'wasteland' into productive agricultural land. Though oste...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesParadox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt C...
Shoshana Keller, "Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence" (U Toronto Press, 2019)
March 22, 2020 04:00 - 1 hourShoshana Keller’s new book, Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence (University of Toronto Press, 2019) provides an excellent introduction and overview of the history of Central Asia, from roughly the 14th century to the present. Focused on the territory of contemporary Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, this book offers a general narrative of Central Asian history (and Central Asian entanglements with Russia) for undergraduate students, Cent...
Richard Pomfret, "The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton UP, 2019)
February 27, 2020 09:00 - 57 minutesRichard Pomfret’s The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2019) looks at the economies of the five former Soviet Republics of Kazkahstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, considering the different trajectories of each of the countries. The book provides an overview of the experience of these economies in the 1990s, before looking specifically at each of the independent countries. The book’s final chapters look at problems of re...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
February 25, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesHow does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identitie...
Charlene Makley, "The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China" (Cornell UP, 2018)
February 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourRebgong, in the Northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (China’s Qinghai Province), is in the midst of a ‘Battle for Fortune.’ That is, a battle to both accumulate as much fortune, but also a battle to decide which definitions of fortune are going to dominate Tibetan society: a material fortune based in ‘authoritarian capitalism’ or a Buddhist form of ‘counterdevelopment’ based in traditional ideas about language, landscapes, and compassion. In The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, ...
Abdullah Qodiriy, "Bygone Days" (Bowker, 2019)
February 06, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel O’tkan Kunlar (Bygone Days) brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences. The story, which simultaneously follows the personal story of a Muslim reformer and trader and the court struggles between the rulers of Central Asia, gives us a glimpse into early Soviet Central Asia, as well as the world of Central Asia on the eve of 19th-century Russian Imperial conquest. Yet, Qodiriy’s Bygone Days...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIf you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the sam...
Marlene Laruelle, "The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan" (Lexington Books, 2019)
January 09, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesThe Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan (Lexington Books, 2019), edited by Marlene Laruelle, looks at the younger generations of Kazakhstan that have come of age during the post-Soviet presidency of Nursultan Nazarbayev. A collection of essays, the book presents new approaches for thinking about the “post-Soviet”-ness of Kazakhstan and for making sense of important political, cultural, and social changes in Kazakhstan during the country’s encounter with global capitalism. The volume is...
Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, "Night and Day: A Novel" (Academic Studies Press, 2019)
January 03, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesChristopher Fort’s new translation of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s Night and Day: A Novel (Academic Studies Press, 2019) (Kecha va Kunduz) gives readers a chance to dive into the world of early 20th century Uzbek literature and understand the complex social problems of late Russian imperial Turkestan. This book will be interesting for a wide range of readers, including those interested in the history of Russia and Central Asia, as well as the nature of colonial and post-colonialism i...