Panel Presenters:
Ulil Abshar-Abdalla founded and serves as Director of
the Liberal Islam Network (JIL), and is one of the most prominent Muslim
intellectuals in Indonesia
today. Ulil Abashar-Abdalla graduated from the Faculty of Islamic Law,
Muhammad bin Saud University, Indonesia.
Born in Central Java, he spent 15 years in Pesantren
(Islamic Boarding School) in his hometown of Pati. He is concurrently occupying
several positions in his professional capacity. These include, Head of the
Liberal Islam Network, Project Director of Indonesian Conference on Religion
and Peace (ICRP) and Head of Research and Human Resource Development Institute
of Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation with a following of
about 40 million. He is a regular contributor to several dailies and magazines
in Indonesia,
including Indonesia's
foremost daily Tempo Magazine. He has also published a book, The
Private and The Public in Indonesian Islamic Discourse (1998).
Imtiaz Ahmed is Professor and Chair of the Department
of International Relations, University of Dhaka,
Bangladesh. He is a regular speaker and consultant at the
Institute of Peace
and Conflict Studies, New Delhi and
the founding editor of the scholarly journal “Theoretical
Perspectives”. His publications
include Srilanka Today: Governmentality In Crisis (1993) and the edited volumes
Bangladesh and SAARC: Issues, Perspectives, and Outlook (with Ifthekaruzzaman, 1992) and Bangladesh Foreign
Policy in the New Millennium (forthcoming 2004). His recent articles include “South Asia Without SAARC”
(2002), “Bangladesh-Myanmar
Relations and the Stateless Rohingyas” (2001), and “State and Statelessness in South Asia” (2003).
Gardner Bovingdon is Assistant Professor of Central
Eurasian Studies at the University of Indiana
and has taught at taught at Cornell, Yale, and Washington
University. He received his Ph.D. (2002) in Government
from Cornell University. His research interests are politics in
contemporary Xinjiang; history of modern Xinjiang; historiography in China;
and nationalism and ethnic conflict state.
His dissertation, based on nearly two years of field research, was
titled Strangers in Their Own
Land: The Politics of
Identity in Chinese Central Asia. He is currently working on a book
manuscript on politics in modern Xinjiang. His publications include “CCP
Policies and Popular Responses in Xinjiang, 1949 to the Present,” “Contested Histories"
(forthcoming), “The Not-So-Silent Majority: Uyghur Resistance to Han Rule in
Xinjiang” (2002) and “The History of the History of Xinjiang”
(2001).
Partha Chatterjee is Professor of PoliticalScience at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta,
India and Professor of
Anthropology at Columbia University, U.S.A. Works such as Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial WorldThe Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories (1995) have been widely influential in the fields of
political science, anthropology, and history and contributed to the
development of post-colonial studies. His edited volumes include Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender
and Violence (with Pradeep
Jeganathan, 2000), The Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian
Nation-state (1998), State
and Politics in India (1997),
Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (1995), and
Subaltern Studies VII (Gyanendra
Pandey, 1992). His most recent books include A
Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002) and The Politics of the
Governed: Considerations on Political Society in Most of the World (2004). (1986) and
Elmira Köchümkulkizi is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. Her dissertation title is Reforming Kyrgyz Islam: Banning or Maintaining Traditional Kyrgyz Nomadic Customs? She is originally from Kyrgyzstan and she sings Kyrgyz traditional songs accompanying herself with the komuz, three-stringed instrument of the Kyrgyz and also recites from the Kyrgyz national epic Manas. Her specialization is nomadic cultures and traditions of Central Asia. She received her MA and BA from the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization at the University of Washington as well, focusing on Turkic Oral Epic Tradition, Languages and Literature.
Dru C. Gladney, Professor of Asian Studies and
Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i
at Manoa, received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University
of Washington, Seattle,
has been a Fulbright Research Scholar twice to China
and Turkey, and
has conducted long-term field research in Western China,
Central Asia, and Turkey.
Dr. Gladney has authored over 50 academic articles and chapters, as well as
the following books: Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's
Republic (Harvard University Press, 2nd edition 1996); Ethnic Identity
in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality (Wadsworth, 1998);
and Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, China, Korea,
Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the U.S. (Editor, Stanford University Press,
1998). A consultant to the Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation, World Bank, the
Getty Museum, SAIC, National Academy of Sciences, the European Center for
Conflict Prevention, UNHCR, and UNESCO, Prof. Gladney's research has been
regularly featured on CNN, BBC, VOA, National Public Radio, al-Jazeerah, and in
Newsweek, Time, Washington Post, Honolulu Advertiser,
International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and The New York
Times. Dr. Gladney has served as a Senior Fellow at the East-West
Center, Academic Dean of the Asia-Pacific
Center, a Kukin Scholar at Harvard
University, a Senior Scholar at the
Max Planck Institute, a MacArthur Fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies, Princeton, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge
University. His most recent book
is: Dislocating China:
Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004).
Further information and on-line publications can be found at: www.hawaii.edu/dru.
Huma
Haq is an anthropologist trained at the University
of Washington (PhD 1995). She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at
Quaid-I-Azam University,
Islamabad, Pakistan,
and she maintains an active career in public and applied scholarship and
recently served as a consultant on the Customary Law Project in the
Northern Areas of Pakistan and Co-Director of the Violence Against Women
Project of the Applied Socio-economic Research Council. Her recent publications include Customary
law regarding use, management and preservation of Natural Resources: A Case
Study of Northern AreasFeminist Islam and Sexist Muslims: A Case
Study of Rural Punjab Pakistan” (2000), and “Militarization, Popular
Cultural Discourse and State Policy-- A War of Positions Against Women’s Body”
(2001).
Ali F. Igmen is a historian of 19th and 20th Century Central Asia, specifically Kyrgyzstan, the Soviet Union and Middle East. He earned his Ph.D. in 2004 from the
Department of History at the University
of Washington. His
dissertation is entitled “Building Soviet Central Asia, 1920-1939: Kyrgyz
Houses of Culture and Self-Fashioning Kyrgyzness.” He was born in Turkey. In 1983, he received a
Master of Public and International Affairs degree from the University of
Pittsburgh. In 1993, he also received a
Master of Arts degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the
University of Washington. Since 1995, he
has taught numerous history courses at the University of Osh and National State
University of Kyrgyzstan in Bishkek, and at the University of Washington in
Seattle. His course titles include “Stalinism in Central Asia,” “American and
European Dissidents in the Soviet Union,” “Central Asia Through Western Eyes”
and “Modern Middle East Since 1789.” In
pursuit of his research, he has received numerous awards from various
institutions, including Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council,
Foreign Language and Area Studies and United States Information Agency. He has studied Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik
and Russian languages. Since 1993, he
has presented papers in ten scholarly conferences such as Middle East Studies
and Central Eurasian Studies Conference.
Currently, he is an
Century Central Asia, specifically Kyrgyzstan, Soviet Union and Middle East. He
earned his Ph.D. in 2004 from the Department of History at the University of
Washington. His dissertation is entitled “Building Soviet Central Asia,
1920-1939: Kyrgyz Houses of Culture and Self-Fashioning Kyrgyzness.” He was
born in Turkey. editor-at-large of the Central Eurasian
Studies Review.
Maria Jaschok is Director of the International Gender Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth
House (Dept of International Development), and seniorUniversity
of Oxford. Her research interests
are in the areas of religion, gender and agency; gendered constructions
of memory; feminist ethnographic practice; marginality and identity in
contemporary China.
She is involved in on-going collaborative research projects in central China,
addressing issues of religious and secular identity, and the implications
of growing female membership of religions for local citizenship and civil
society. Her recent indicative publications include
‘Gender, Religion and Little Traditions: Henanese Women Singing Minguo’ in Women in China: The Republican Period in
Historical Perspective; ‘Kua
jie yan shuo- shuxie chenmode lishi’ (Speaking across boundaries – writing
muted history) in Bolan Qunshu; ‘Violation and Resistance: Women, Religion and Chinese Statehood’ in Violence Against Women; ‘Sources and methods for research on women and
Islamic cultures in China, 1700-1900’ in Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures.
Volume I; "Ba Nü Ahong", "Du Shuzhen Ahong", "Yang Huizhen Ahong" in Biographical Dictionary of
Chinese Women 1912-2000; Chinese
Women Organizing; REECASdres, feminists, muslims, queers (co-ed.), Berg; The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam: A mosque of their own,
Curzon; ‘Outsider Within’ – Speaking to excursions across cultures’ in Feminist Theory; Women and Chinese
Patriarchy (co-ed). Maria Jaschok is a founder member of Women's Initiative
on International Affairs in Asia and a co-founder of
Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Network (WAGNet).
Marianne Kamp is a historian of 20th century Central
Asia, especially Uzbekistan.
She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a BA in Russian Language
and Literature, and earned her PhD in 1998 from the Department of Near
Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She has
been assistant professor of History at the University of Wyoming
since 2000. She was a visiting assistant professor of History at Whitman College
in Walla Walla, Washington
from 1997 to 2000, and was a lecturer in Uzbek language at the University of Michigan from 1994 to 1997. She
has carried out historical and oral history research in Uzbekistan in 1992-93, funded by IREX; in 1996,
funded by the Ford Foundation and NCSEER; in 1999 and 2001, funded by Whitman College
and the University of Wyoming; and in 2002-2004, funded by NCEEER and the University of Wyoming. Her book on Uzbek
women and the unveiling campaign is forthcoming from the University of Washington
press, entitled The New Woman in Uzbekistan (2006). She has
published articles in Central Asian Monitor, the International
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Oral History Review, and
in a collection edited by Pauline Jones Luong, entitled The Transformation
of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence
(Cornell, 2004). Her current research project concerns oral histories of
collectivization of agriculture in Uzbekistan. She is also
co-editor of the Central Eurasian Studies Review.
Sumit K. Mandal is a Research Fellow at the Institute
of Malaysian and International
Studies at the University Kebangsaan, Malaysia.
He holds a PhD in History from Columbia
University. His research focuses on
Arabs in 19th Century Java and on challenges to authoritarianism in
Islamic Southeast Asia. His publications include “Boundaries and
Beyond: Whither the Cultural Bases for Political Community in Malaysia?"
(in R. Hefner, ed., The Politics of Multiculturalism), “Transethnic Solidarities,
Racialisation, and Social Equality” (2004), and a co-edited volume
Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia
(2003).
Norani
Othman, Associate
Professor and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International
Studies, obtained her MPhil through the University of Hull. In addition to her academic career, Dr Othman is a founding member of SIS Forum Malaysia, a Muslim Women’s group
popularly known in Malaysia as Sisters-in-Islam and
currently sits on the organization’s Board as well as being a Vice-President of
the Malaysian Association of Social Science. She is the editor of two books: Shari‘a Law and the Modern
Nation-State: A Malaysian Symposium (1994) and Gender, Culture and Religion:
Equal before God, Unequal before Man (with Cecilia Ng, 1995). Her most
recent publications include Capturing Globalization (with James
Mittelman, 2001), an edited collection in the Malay language entitled Malaysia Menangani Globalisasi:
Peserta atau Mangsa? [Malaysia confronting
Globalization: As an Actor or Victim?] (2000), and “Grounding Human Rights Arguments
in Non-Western Culture: Shari‘a and the Citizenship
Rights of Women in a Modern Islamic Nation-State” (1999).
Jakob Rigi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell
University, has a PhD from London
University. He is the author of the
book Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (2002) and
articles such as “Corruption in Kazakhstan” and “Conditions of
Post-Soviet Youth and Work in Almaty, Kazakhstan.” His main research
interests are power, money, commodity and value, class, gender, ethnicity, state, market, Mafia
and sex work. He has done extended fieldwork in Kazakhstan
and Russia,
1995 - 1996 and 2003; he is working currently on various processes of
commoditization in the post-Soviet space.
Azade-Ayse Rorlich, Associate Professor of History,
studies Russia
and Eurasia social and cultural history, including
history of Turkic Muslim people in Russia,
Muslim women of imperial Russia She
received her Ph.D. in History from the University
of Wisconsin, Madison. Her
publications include a book on The Volga Tatars. A Profile in National Resilience; and chapters on Identities
in Flux: Kazakh Cinema at the End of the Twentieth Century, The Challenge of
Belonging: Muslim Women and the Contested Terrain of Identity in Late Imperial
Russia, and Islam, Identity, and Politics. Kazakhstan:1990-2000.
and post-Soviet sovereign republics.
Endo Suanda, is an ethnomusicologist, educator, and an
internationally recognized dancer, director, and puppeteer. He teaches at
the Indonesian College of the Arts in Bandung and regularly lectures around the world for
UNESCO, at international performing arts venues, and universities He was
Director of the Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts (MSPI) for many
years and he is currently working with the Program Assistant in Media, Arts,
and Culture at the Ford Foundation office in Jakarta on a project to integrate
a performing arts curriculum into the public schools as a way to teach
tolerance and respect in the multicultural society of Indonesia. He
publishes articles on education and culture in Indonesian and English, and
has done extensive research on the Wayang Golek traditions of Cirebon,
West Java.
Nazif Shahrani is Professor of Anthropology and
Central and Middle Eastern
Studies Indiana University,
Bloomington, where he is also the
Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and the
Director the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program. He received his training in Anthropology at
the University of Washington
(PhD 1976) and he has held a number of prestigious fellowships including a
Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship (1998).
He has conducted research in Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
Uzbekistan and is the author of The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan:
Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War (1979, 2003) and Family Lives and
Public Careers in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: Dynamics of a Muslim Tradition in
a Political Culture of ‘Scientific Atheism’ (forthcoming 2005). He also
edited Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological
Perspectives (with Robert Canfield, 1984) and publishes on a wide range
of topics including “Afghanistan's
Muslim 'Refugee-Warriors' in Pakistan:
Politics of Mistrust and Mistrust of Politics” (1996), and “Pining for
Bukhara in Afghanistan: Poetics and Politics of Exhilic Identity and Emotions”
(2001), “War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan”
(2002).
Chairs & Discussants:
Tani E. Barlow is Professor of History and Women’s
Studies. Her most recent books include The Question of Women in
Chinese FeminismCinema and Desire: The Cultural
Politics of Feminism Marxist Dai Jinhua (Verso Press, 2003), co-edited with
Jing Wang. Her current research focuses on the Shanghai advertising industry and the rise of
social science in Chinese colonial modernity. Barlow is the founding
editor of positions: east asia cultures critique and the 2004-05
director of the Project for Critical Asian Studies.
Carlo Bonura is a political theorist and Luce
Assistant Professor of Islamic Societies of Southeast Asia in the Department of
Politics and Government and the Asian Studies Program at the University of Puget Sound
in Tacoma, WA. His current research interests
include the politics of Islamic education in Thailand
and Malaysia as well as
examining the current turn toward civil society in anthropologies of Islam in Southeast Asia.
R. Kent Guy is Professor of History and Chair of the China Studies
Program at the University
of Washington. He
received his Ph.D. from the Department of History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. Professor Guy’s
research interests include pre-modern China and Chinese political and
cultural history. He has authored several articles as well as the
following books: Inspired Tinkering: The Qing Creation of the Province,
The Limits on the Rule of Law in China (2000), and The Emperor’s Four
Treasuries: Scholar and the State in the Late Chi’ien-lung Period (1987).
Stephen E. Hanson
(Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)
is Boeing International Professor at the University
of Washington, Associate Professor of
Political Science, and the Director of the Ellison Center
for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of
International Studies. He is the author
of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions
(University of North Carolina Press, 1997), winner of the 1998 Wayne S.
Vucinich book award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies. He is also a co-editor of Capitalism
and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist
Rule, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), a co-author of Postcommunism
and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001), and the
author of numerous journal articles examining postcommunist politics in
comparative perspective.
Laurie J. Sears is a Professor of History at the University of Washington. She teaches Indonesian and Southeast Asian
histories and literatures, historiography, and postcolonial theories. She is the author of Shadows of Empire:
Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales and the editor of Fantasizing
the Feminine in Indonesia. Her
forthcoming edited volume is Knowing Southeast Asia: New Transnationalisms
and Disciplinary Doubts. She is
currently finishing a manuscript on postcolonial literatures of trauma and
haunting in Java.
K. Sivaramakrishnan is Associate Professor of
Anthropology and International Studies. His research interests include
environmental history, political anthropology, migration, cultural
geography, South Asia. He is the author
of Modern Forests (Stanford, 1999, rpt. 2002) and co-editor of
Agrarian Environments (Duke 2000), Regional Modernities
(Stanford 2003), and Ecological Nationalisms (University of Washington
Press, forthcoming). He is currently an ACLS
Fellow (2004-05), working on various essays and a book on the politics of
nature conservation in India
and other tropical locations.
Daniel Waugh is a member of the History Department,
Jackson School of International Studies and Slavic Department and a former
Director of the REECAS program in JSIS, Daniel Waugh teaches early Russian
history and the history of Central Asia.
He is co-editor of Civil Society in Central Asia (Univ. of Washington
Press, 1999), editor of both The Silk Road (a journal published by the
Silkroad Foundation) and the educational resources section of Central
Eurasian Studies Review, and project director of Silk Road Seattle
(www.uwch.org/silkroad). He
has traveled extensively in Central Asia and
is currently completing a book on the Kashgar writings of British Consul C. P.
Skrine.