Posts

Edward Allworth was the first Central Asia scholar I met, when I was considering becoming an academic studying this region.  He was one of the few American specialists of Central Asia during the Cold War, remembered here by journalist Bruce Panier.  It’s a bit like returning a favor for me to now give a lecture in his honor.

I’ll be speaking at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 31 October 2022, about my developing project on  Eurasian elites.  See their announcement.

Next week at the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) annual meeting at Indiana University in Bloomington, I lead a Network Event on the theme, “Is ‘Corruption’ a Useful Category for the Study of Eurasian Governance and Society?”

Starting 1 July 2022, I’ll be Chair of the newly named Department of Near Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures, an academic unit covering the Middle East, North Africa, India, Central Asia, and more.  The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences just posted an announcement and newstory.

Morgan

The Fulbright-Hays program for Faculty research is being reinstated by the U.S. Congress, after a many-year hiatus.  They asked me to make this short promotional video of my experience in 2008 in Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan through Fulbright-Hays.  For Ohio State faculty, inquire and apply here; for OSU students, you can navigate to the appropriate student fellowship; Joanna Kukielka-Blaser is OSU’s Fulbright-Hays Project Director, and is super-helpful.   For others, general info on Fulbright-Hays is here, but you have to go through your campus Fulbright Program Director if you have one.

This lecture relates to my new project on Eurasian elites, their motivations, global networks, and effects in societies. Public lecture at The Ohio State University, 18 March 2020.

CESS, the Central Eurasian Studies Society, just elected me as its new President.  It is a three-year term as one of its executives:  I start in October as its President-Elect, become its President in October 2020 (when Ohio State University hosts the CESS annual conference), and its Past President in October 2021. I have seen CESS as a crucial institution in promoting a broad vision of Central Eurasian studies, where different disciplinary perspectives substantively engage each other to make fuller sense of the region’s issues, and where knowledge of this region also speaks to problems beyond it.  I would like to further these goals by serving as its President.

I finished a twelve month stint as Interim Chair of the Near Eastern Languages & Cultures (NELC) Department at Ohio State, stepping down on July 1, 2018.

I’ve updated my “Writings” page with links to my academic and public writing. Glad to be back to research!

Morgan

I was involved with Kyrgyz, Canadian, Dutch, and U.S. colleagues in two projects in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (December 2016) by the Global Centre for Pluralism (Ottawa, Canada):

1. Workshop with the History Commission of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, 13 December 2016, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
2. “Forum on History and Memory: Toward an Inclusive Society”, 12 December 2016, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Why does democracy not make sense?  See my new post in the Huffington Post!  I’m applying insights from complexity science on self-organization to answer those who say there is nothing between strict state control and total chaos.