Date: Friday, April 5, 2013

Location: The Richard Ettinghausen Library at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University

Address: 255 Sullivan Street, New York, NY 10012

Co-sponsored by:
The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University
The Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies at Columbia University
The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University
The Middle East Institute at Columbia University
The Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University
The Department of Anthropology at New York University
The Anthropology Graduate Students Association and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University

Each year the Organization for the Advancement of Studies of Inner Eurasian Societies (OASIES) brings together scholars with intersecting interests from around both New York City and the worldwide academic community to discuss an interdisciplinary theme of theoretical relevance and importance for the region of Eurasia, broadly defined. The sixth annual graduate student conference, to be held on April 5, 2013, is entitled Seeing Eurasia Inside and Out: Representation, Authority, and Inequity.

The 2013 conference prompts reflection on the idea that representations in the world are always stratified, coming from different positions and holding different valences of authority, and that these representations often produce or reproduce inequality, whether they come from observers on the outside looking in or from observers on the inside looking out. Conference participants engage with this claim by exploring diverse kinds of representations (including literary, musical, visual, and oral) and issues such as stratification, centers and peripheries, elites (intellectual, political, economic, and religious), diaspora, governance and citizenship, gender and ethnicity, and the negotiation of belonging. OASIES stresses multidisciplinarity by inviting submissions from a variety of departments, including but not limited to anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, literature, political science, religion, and sociology, as well as area studies programs focusing on Central Asia, East Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia, the Middle East, Mongolia, and South Asia.

9:45 Introductory Remarks

10-11:15 Recovering Lost Voices

“Clash of Authorities at the Margins: The Lost Voice of Mongol Buddhists in Late Imperial China, 1780s”
Lan Wu (Columbia University)

“Looking less/more Sinicized out of consensus: comparing ethnic-boundary-making among Uyghurs and (Southern) Mongolians”
Sansar Tsakhirmaa (Johns Hopkins University)

“Bride Kidnapping Does Not Exist in Armenia: The peculiar public denial of a pervasive private practice”
Christopher Edling (Columbia University)

 11:30-12:45 Producing Symbols of the State

“An unfinished transition: oligarchs and anti-oligarchic discourses in the Republic of Moldova (2009-2012)”
Ion Marandici (Rutgers University)

“The So-Called Sasanian-Senmurv Kaftan: A Nomadic Assimilation of Imperial Imagery at Moshchevaja Balka”
Betty Hensellek (NYU) 

“Musical Jadidism: Uzeyir Hacibeyli and the Birth of Azeri Opera”
Kelsey Rice (University of Pennsylvania)

“Representing Oil and Authority in Contemporary Azerbaijan”
Julian Gantt (CUNY, Graduate Center)  

 12:45-1:30 Lunch

1:30 Keynote Address

“What contrasts, virtually immeasurable!
Difference, delimitation, and representations that matter in the Ferghana valley”
Madeleine Reeves Lecturer, University of Manchester

3:00-4:00 Writing Culture on the Margins
“Mikhail Andreev and the Cultivation of Tajikness: The Politics of Ethnographic Knowledge Production in Early 20th-Century Central Asia“
Brinton Ahlin (NYU)

“Blok, Race, and Revolution”
Emily Wang (Princeton University)

“Creating a Dam National Space: Rakhmon’s Socialist Realist Promotion of Roghun”
Gloria Funcheon (University of Kansas) 

4:15 Closing Remarks

Arienne Dwyer Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities
CUNY, Graduate Center

5:00 Wine & Cheese