New Books in Central Asian Studies

Feb 10 2025 172 ep. 59 mins 1.8k
New Books in Central Asian Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Central Asia about their New Books

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Laurel Victoria Gray, "Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Feb 10 2025 34 mins  
Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first comprehensive work in English on the three major regional styles of Uzbek women's dance – Ferghana, Khiva and Bukhara – and their broader Silk Road cultural connections, from folklore roots to contemporary stage dance. The book surveys the remarkable development from the earliest m

Petya Andreeva, "Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Jan 25 2025 80 mins  
Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) focuses on this ani

Vicky Davis, "Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Dec 28 2024 82 mins  
Central Asia in World War Two: The Impact and Legacy of Fighting for the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first book to tackle the subject of minorities fighting for the Soviet Union under Stalin in the Second World War. Based on meticulous archival research, it considers the interactions of the individual citizen and the Soviet state, weaving together the experiences of over

Marianne Kamp, "Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Dec 26 2024 67 mins  
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were dri

Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Dec 12 2024 62 mins  
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate

Victoria Soyan Peemot, "The Horse in My Blood: Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

Dec 03 2024 63 mins  
A fascinating interspecies relationship can be seen among the horse breeding pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains of Inner Asia. Growing up in a community with close human-horse relationships, in The Horse in My Blood: Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains (Berghahn Books, 2024), Victoria Soyan Peemot uses her knowledge of the local language and horsemanshi

Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Nov 19 2024 60 mins  
In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"—primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus—with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"—the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the

J. Arch Getty and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, "Reflections on Stalinism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2024)

Nov 16 2024 46 mins  
In this episode, Alisa talks with Lewis H. Siegelbaum, who, along with J. Arch Getty, edited Reflections on Stalinism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024), a collection of essays by twelve prominent scholars in the field who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of Stalinism as an authoritarian dictatorship determined to build a version of socialism in the

Ali Igmen, "Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

Nov 13 2024 46 mins  
In this episode, Alisa talks with Ali İğmen, Professor of Central Asian History and the Director of the Oral History Program at California State University. In his book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan, Dr. İğmen examines Soviet Russia’s efforts to reshape local Kyrgyz culture into Soviet culture, as well as the ways in which the local Kyrgyz re

Norman Naimark, “Stalin’s Genocides” (Princeton UP, 2010)

Oct 09 2024 73 mins  
Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of “dekulakization,” his pitiless deportation of “unreliable” ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to “cleanse” the Communist Party of supposed “enemies of the people”–all of these actions resulted in mas