This year while I’m on a research fellowship, I’m helping the University of Utah’s Asia Center to organize an interdisciplinary conference. We’re planning it around the theme of “Asia in the Russian Imagination,” but are expecting it to be more broadly concerned with the history of Siberia, Central Asia, and the Russian Far East and North Pacific. The conference will be held at the University of Utah’s campus in Salt Lake City on March 23-24, 2018. Over the past three years, the Asia Center’s “Siberian Initiative” has sponsored talks on anthropology, environmental studies, history, film studies, and linguistics, and we are continuing this interdisciplinary approach to Russia in Asia/Asia in Russia at our conference.
We welcome proposals exploring political, economic, and socio-cultural interactions from a variety of fields and perspectives. We foresee extended discussions on Russian-Asian connections and networks, as well as policies, processes, and populations in “Russian Asia,” within the imperial, Soviet, or post-Soviet eras. We hope that this conference honors the interdisciplinary tradition established by the British Universities Siberian Studies Seminar, last held in 2007. Following the conference, the organizers intend to publish a selection of the essays either as a special issue of a journal or as an edited volume.
Please submit proposals for individual papers no later than 15 October 2017 to the Events Coordinator of Utah’s International Studies program, Rocío Torres rocio.torresmora@utah.edu. Please include a subject line of “Asia-Russia 2018” to make sure you receive full consideration. Submissions should include a 250-word abstract as well as a brief (1-2 page) C.V. The organizers will make their decisions by early December.