About Us

The Central Asia Research Cluster aims to provide a transnational platform for scholars, librarians, and archivists from Central Asia and other parts of the world to work on joint publications. As Central Asian researchers are underrepresented in the published works on this region, transnational collaboration with scholars in Central Asia and other areas outside of North America is central to this initiative. Our goal for this research cluster is to publish two special issues of peer-reviewed journals and a collective monograph. 

This research cluster explores the theme “Knowledge Production and the Periphery Revisited: Decentering Cultural Heritage, Public Histories and Memory in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia, 1917-Present.” The production and dissemination of knowledge in the peripheries of Soviet and Post-Soviet space has produced numerous information networks and conduits through which the center-periphery relationships are shaped, repurposed, and continuously renegotiated. We seek to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, archivists, and librarians to examine the roots of knowledge production and preservation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia, as well as recontextualizing the cultural heritage, histories, and memory institutions that illuminate and complicate the many layers of center-periphery relations at local, national, and regional levels.

This cluster aims not only to focus on “peripheral” stories and archives in a geographical sense, but also to engage with the many genealogies of thinking, remembering, performing, and producing knowledge in Central Asia. The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet state presents scholars, archivists, and librarians with a unique opportunity to retrace and rethink the origins and meanings of peripheral knowledge and its relation to ethnic minorities in the Soviet and Post-Soviet space.

The Central Asia Research Cluster is the inaugural edition of a prospective series of collaborative research projects, each centering a different region in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia.The work of the Central Asia Research Cluster is made possible by the generous support of: 

• The Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Center (U of Illinois)

• The Humanities Research Institute (U of Illinois)

• The Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center (Indiana University Bloomington)

• The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (U of Illinois)

• School of Information Sciences (U of Illinois)

• Illinois International (U of Illinois)

• The Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (U of Illinois)