Both Keynote Lectures will be given at the Franke Institute for the Humanities (1100 East 57th Street)

First Keynote Lecture – Friday, February 26th at 9:30am 

Nazım Hikmet’s Future Past: Communist Mediations Between Turkey and the Soviet Union 

Nergis Ertürk (Penn State University)

Nergis Ertürk’s research interests include modern Turkish literature, culture, and intellectual history, early Soviet Azeri literature and culture, comparative (post)colonialisms, comparative modernisms, and deconstruction. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2011), the recipient of the 2012 MLA Prize for a First Book, and the co-editor (with Özge Serin) of a forthcoming special issue ofboundary 2 entitled Marxism, Communism, and Translation. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in the journals PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, boundary 2, New Literary History, Interventions, and Jadaliyya. Before coming to Penn State, Ertürk was Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, SUNY, from 2006-2008. She was a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society during spring semester 2007, and Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, during fall semester 2008. During 2012-2013, she was a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Postdoctoral Fellow for Transregional Research on Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections, and during 2014-2015, she held an American Council Learned Societies (ACLS) Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship.She is currently working on two book projects: one on early twentieth-century Turkish and Soviet literary encounters, and another on the literatures of revolution in the Muslim Caucasus from 1905 through 1917.

Second Keynote Lecture – Saturday, February 27th 

Writing Central Asian History in the Shadow of Empire

Adeeb Khalid (Carleton College)

Adeeb Khalid’s research interests center on the history of the sedentary societies of Central Asia from the time of the Russian conquest of the 1860s to the present. He is particularly interested in the transformations of culture and identity as a result of historical change. The fate of Islam under Tsarist and Soviet rule has occupied a central place in his research.

Professor Khalid has just published Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR with Cornell University Press. He is the author of two books, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press, 1998), and Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press, 2007), which won the 2008 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies “for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year.” His research has been supported by grants from a number of foundations: the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and IREX.