The UCLA Program on Central Asia is pleased to announce that it will be holding a conference on language and identity in Central Asia on May 4-5, 2012. We are seeking the participation of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty to take part in a two-day workshop to present and discuss their work in this area. These participants will be joining a group of four invited established scholars in the field and faculty discussants. Confirmed invited scholars are Professors Azade-Ayse Rorlich of the University of Southern California, and Gardner Bovingdon of Indiana University, and Harsha Ram of UC Berkeley. Other invited scholars will be listed on the conference webpage as soon as their participation has been confirmed.
The conference is organized along four axes of interaction between Central Asia and other parts of the world:
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contact with the Islamic Middle East and Ottoman world
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contact with the Russian Empire and its successor states
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internal contact among populations of Central Asia
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contacts with China and East Asia
Each axis will begin with a keynote talk by an invited scholar, followed by one or two panels that further explore the area.
We are seeking papers that treat questions of language and identity along any of these axes of interaction, either finished work or reports of early works in progress. It is our hope that the conference will provide an opportunity for scholars to present and refine their current research in an area that often lacks institutional support. The conference will be held in a workshop format; panelists will submit their papers ahead of time, allowing for more coherent and productive discussion during the conference.
Submit abstracts of up to 300 words to naomi.caffee@gmail.com by February 1, 2012. Complete versions of the accepted papers must be submitted by April 15, 2012. Unfortunately, we cannot provide funding for panel participants’ accommodation or travel, but limited accommodations may be available with graduate students at UCLA.
We look forward to receiving your abstracts, and to a productive conference in May.
For information on the conference, see //www.international.ucla.edu/asia/centralasia.
In addition to the UCLA Program on Central Asia, the conference is being supported by the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Postcolonial Literature and Theory Colloquium