Dr Beibit Shangirbayeva was an Associate Professor at the International Law Department of the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian University (Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan), where she taught numerous subjects in International Law in Kazakh, English and Russian; recently, she joined Nazarbayev University. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, human rights and politics, theory and history of state and law, international law-making, constitutional law of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and other areas.

Apart from doing research, teaching, and working as a lawyer, Beibit’s experience includes positions at the EU Delegation, the Embassies of Japan and South Africa to Kazakhstan, and the EU Project on Enhancing Criminal Justice. Dr Shangirbayeva is also the first Kazakh female to publish a monograph in English for the famous publisher, Wolters Kluwerin, in 2020. The monograph is devoted to the Constitutional Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan and is a part of the multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws.

My name is Tomiris Kadyrzhanova. I was born and live in Kazakhstan. I received my Bachelor’s Degree in International Law from M. Narikbayev KAZGUU University (Astana, Kazakhstan) in 2021. Now, I am a 2nd year student of the Master’s Degree in International Law at L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University (Astana, Kazakhstan). My research interests lie at the transformation of legal foundations in the Kazakh nomadic culture; in addition, I conduct research in the field of personal data protection in the digital age. My first research article was published on this topic.

Sabina Amanbayeva is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oklahoma City University. Her research interests include Soviet children’s literature and animation, Russian translations of Shakespeare, and identity and culture in modern Kazakhstan. Her most recent articles are “Abai Kunanbaiuly and Russian Culture: Changing Paradigms in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan,” forthcoming in Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context, edited by Cathy McAteer and Muireann Maguire (Open Book Publishers, forthcoming in Winter 2023) and an article, in Russian, entitled “Soviet cartoon Kroshka Enot (1974) and American children’s story Little Raccoon and the Thing in the Pool (1963)," published in Detskie Chtenia, a Russian academic journal dedicated to children’s literature. She received her PhD in English from the University of Delaware.

Tuleshova Ulzhan, Ph. D., is a Senior Instructor of the Historical Department at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. Tuleshova's research interest is centered around the social history of the Kazakh Steppe in the 19th-20th centuries, and her Ph D. thesis title is "Kazakh Nobility of the 19th Century: Formation and Development". Her most recent publication is "Nomadic Nobles: Pastoralism and Privilege in the Russian Empire, " authored by Gulmira Sultangalieva, Ulzhan Tuleshova, and Paul W. Werth on Slavic Review, Vol. 81, #1, 2022.

I am a second-year PhD student in the Linguistics department of the University of Georgia focusing on early child language development, bilingualism, language teaching, and sociolinguistic studies. I majored in Kazakh Language and Literature at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (2013) and earned an MA degree in Linguistics (2015) exploring code choices, language contact, and Kazakh-Russian bilingualism in college students.

Gavin Slade is an associate professor of sociology at Nazarbayev University. He has written extensively on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union. The proposed study works within a broader four year project called "In the Gulag’s Shadow: Perceiving, Consuming and Producing Prisons in the former Soviet Union," funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK and a collaboration between a number of universities.

Alexei Trochev is an associate professor of political science at Nazarbayev University. He has written extensively on judicial reform, legal attitudes, and broader criminal justice with a focus on Russia and Kazakhstan. Trochev is also an investigator on the "In the Gulag’s Shadow" project.

Eva Rogaar is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, where she studies the lives and activism of young Central Asian development workers between 1970-2020. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2022). Her research interests include religious and ethnic minorities, gender, oral and life history, the history of medicine, youth activism, and development. She is also interested in questions of equity and inclusion in academic research, teaching, and publishing.

Dr. Asel Isaeva is a Head of the Manuscripts Collection at the Aitmatov Institute of Language and Literature under the National Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include folk and translation studies, namely comparative study of Turkic epic poetry; problems of translation of epic poetry into Russian; translation of Aitmatov’s works into Russian; Kayum Miatakov’s role and heritage in the early recording of the Kyrgyz folk traditions. She holds a PhD in Philology.

Dr. Jyldyz Bekbalaeva is the Director of the Library at the American University of Central Asia. She is a teaching faculty at the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include digitization in libraries and archives; preservation of cultural and historic heritage; digital methods in humanities; scholarly communication. She holds an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ph.D. in Linguistics.

Katherine Ashcraft is a MS Library and Information Sciences and MA History candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She currently works as a graduate assistant with the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois, where she serves as a project coordinator for initiatives including the Central Asian Memoirs in the Soviet Era digital collection, Promoting Caucasus and Georgian Studies in the U.S.: A Proposal to Digitize Container Lists to Archival Fonds at the National Archives of Georgia, and the upcoming research cluster “Muslims in a Shifting World.” Her research interests include the history of libraries, children's literature, and literacy in Central Asia.

Maria Glukhova is a Russian Cultural Program Coordinator and a Russian Language Instructor at Colorado College, CO. She received a MA in Linguistics in 2019 from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, where she also taught the Russian language to international students. She has also taught Russian language courses at Pomona College, CA, NSLI-Y, the Bolshoi Ballet Academy program, and Bard College’s Summer Language Intensive program at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her research interests focus on the collective memory of the Soviet era in post-Soviet Central Asia, modern Central Asian language policies within the post-Soviet cultural space, and indigenous peoples' cultures in the region.

Knar Abrahamyan is a music scholar whose work examines the historical and political entanglements of cultural production. Her book project, Opera as Statecraft in Soviet Armenia and Kazakhstan, re-envisions Soviet music history by analyzing the power dynamics between the state and its ethnic and racial Others. It explores opera as a contested imperial space through which the Soviet state pursued colonial subjugation under the guise of cultural modernization. Abrahamyan has presented at major national and international conferences, and her work on Soviet music and politics appeared in theDSCH Journal and a collected volume, Analytical Approaches to 20th-Century Russian Music. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, where she will join the Music Department as Assistant Professor of Music Theory & Race in the fall of 2023.

Dilafruz Nazarova, Ph.D., is an accomplished human rights lawyer from Tajikistan and currently a lecturer at the Political Science Department of Rutgers University. Her areas of expertise primarily include public, human rights, and international law. Her most recent research explores the relationship between patronal regimes and the power of constitutional courts in Central Asia.

Shahnoza Nozimova, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Her research explores state and society relations in Tajikistan, particularly the intersection between gender, Islam, and nation-building. She has published articles in Central Asian Affairs, Asiatische Studien/ Études Asiatiques, and Nationalities Papers.

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the department of German, Nordic, and Slavic. I am writing a dissertation on the representation of Asia and Asiatic space in a contemporary Russian novel. My research interests include Russian orientalism and post-colonial studies in both Russian and Central Asian literatures. I have been teaching Russian as a foreign language for six years now, and I am also interested in decolonizing Slavic studies.

Jeanine Dağyeli is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna, Austria and Research Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her regional expertise is Central Asia. Her research interests include human-envi-ronment relations, labor, media, and cultural heritagefrom both historical and anthropological perspectives.

Anastassiya Kulinova is a PhD student at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. Her research interest lie in the areas of multi-species ethnography, environmental anthropology, indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies.

Chorshanbe Goibnazarov is an Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at the UCA’s School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Development. He teaches Cultural Landscapes at the Naryn and Khorog Campuses. He holds a Ph.D. in Central Asian and Cultural Studies from the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and a Master of Arts in Muslim Cultures from the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations at the Aga Khan University in London, UK. Goibnazarov was on the Fulbright Visiting Scholar fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year at the Music Department of Harvard University.

Dilafza Haydaraliyeva is a recent graduate of University College London, where she received her master’s degree in the Archaeology and Heritage of Asia. She received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology/archaeology with a minor in Middle Eastern languages at the University of McGill. Of Uzbek origin, her areas of interest have been the construction of identity in post-Soviet Central Asia and the rich archaeological history of Central Asia. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining both anthropological and archaeological study.

Assiya Issemberdiyeva is a PhD Candidate in Visual Cultures at Queen Mary University of London. She has also graduated with a BA and MA in Journalism (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University), as well as an MA in Film Studies (Queen Mary University of London).

Xenia Leontyeva is a specialist in cinema economics. She currently serves as Associate Professor at the St. Petersburg State Institute of Cinema and Telwvision and has graduated from the same institution with a PhD in economics and a MA in sociology from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.

Benjamin Arenstein is a PhD student at the University of Chicago studying Russian and Hebrew literature. His research focuses on Soviet-Jewish émigré writing and networks of literary exchange between Israel/Palestine and the Soviet Union.

Mollie Arbuthnot is a research fellow in History and Slavonic Studies at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. Her research interest is the visual and material culture of the early Soviet Union, including mass media, propaganda, and theories of viewership. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester and taught at Durham University before joining Cambridge in 2021.

Zukhra Kasimova is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her area of expertise is Soviet Central Asian history in the postwar/post-Stalin era; her current research interest is in the concept of Soviet hybrid modernity.

Yipeng Zhou is a Research Fellow at the Harvard History Department and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He recently graduated from the Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia MA program at Harvard. He is interested in Soviet nationalities policy and Central Asia-Xinjiang relations in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Kim Lacey is a doctoral candidate in History at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation traces the movement of people from Korea to the Soviet Union and examines their roles and place in the community. Kim holds a BA in Eurasian and East European Studies from Bowdoin College and a MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago. She won the Timberlake Prize from the Central Slavic Conference for the best graduate paper. Kim is the current Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellow, supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Content forthcoming!

Kateřina Zäch is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Fribourg. She is working under the supervision of Prof. Christine Bichsel on the materiality of water infrastructure. She is inspired by materiality, through which she understands the ability to reconcile human and non-human matters as they relate to the technical aspects of water use. Exploring water systems allows her to describe production and construction of materials, human values, visionary ideas, and local projects, as well as practical skills stemming from everyday water politics.

Berikbol Dukeyev received his PhD in Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. He works on the intersection of the politics of memory and history textbooks in post-1991 Kazakhstan, and his research areas include politics and security in Central Asia. He has worked in public and private research and international organizations in Kazakhstan. He has conducted research fellowships at the Central Asia Program at George Washington University (2015) in the U.S. and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (2019, 2022) in Germany. His publications appeared in Central Asian Affairs, OpenDemocracy, and the forthcoming chapter in an edited volume from Lexington Press.

Caterina Re is a PhD candidate in Russian Literature at the University of Genoa (Italy) working on late Soviet and post-Soviet literature from Central Asia in the Russian language, especially on the work of Chingiz Aitmatov, Andrei Volos and Hamid Ismailov. Of particular interest are cultural, historical and social transformations in the region after the fall of the Soviet Union; the dynamics of identity construction and alterity (Soviet Orientalism); debates on the applicability of post-colonial theory to the literatures of Central Asia; and especially "ecocriticism," or environmentalism, and ‘post-humanism’ fields that can offer new insights on the cultural heritage and contemporary literatures of Central Asia. She recently presented "The Post-Soviet and Post-Nuclear Environment in Central Asia: An Ecocritical Reading of Chingiz Aitmatov, Hamid Ismailov and Andrei Volosat" at the 2022 regional conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in Tashkent.

Maria Hristova is Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and Head of the Russian Section at Lewis and Clark College. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2016. Her research is focused on two main projects: 1) the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religion in contemporary Russian-language women’s writing, and 2) environmental themes in (post-)Soviet literature and film. She has published on sociolinguistics in the Balkans, Russian domestic travel writing and postcolonialism, and on post-secular themes in Andrey Zvyagintzev’s films. Most recently, her article, “Asceticism and Embodiment: Female Bodies, Sexuality, and Religious Experiences in Contemporary Russian Women’s Writing,” was published in Canadian Slavonic Papers in 2022. At present, she is finalizing a chapter on atomic bomb representations in Russian and Kazakhstani film for the volume she is also co-editing, Energy/Waste: Approaches to the Environment in Contemporary Post-Soviet Cultures (forthcoming with Slavica Bergensia in 2023). Her current project explores environmental themes in women’s writing of the Thaw period.

Content Forthcoming!

Aijamal Sarybaeva is an Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She teaches courses such as Women’s History, Oral History, Digital History etc. For the last two years, she has been working on the oral history of Kyrgyz women who lived in the 1940s and 1950s and witnessed and experienced the Stalinist regime. This topic has been her research passion, as it uncovers history of women neglected in Kyrgyz, Soviet, and global scholarship.