Tuesday, September 16, 2025

11:00 a.m. (EST)

https://gwu-edu.zoom.us/j/91982860562

This seminar will explore the 15th and 16th-century historiographies of Central Asia as written about during the Cold War, and compare and contrast the approaches of Russian-language and Anglophone scholars. 

Gulandom Yuldasheva will present on “The Timurid Renaissance Revisited: Maria Subtelny and the Soviet Construction of Alisher Navoi,” and illuminate how academics interpreted the complexity of medieval Central Asia’s cultural renaissance and reshaped it to serve contemporary agendas. The legacy of these approaches continues to shape the study of the historical figure Navoi and the Timurid period in which he lived, raising broader questions about historiography, ideology, and cultural memory.
 
Jaimee Comstock-Skipp will discuss “The ‘Iran’ Curtain: Cold-War Scholarship on Illustrated Abu’l-Khayrid (Shaybanid) Arts of the Book from 16th-century Central Asia.” Her art historical focus dwells on the classificatory interpretation of illustrated manuscripts from a dynasty that has remained understudied for political reasons both in the Soviet Union and outside. She will analyze how English and Russian-speaking academicians have situated the dynasty's arts in the trajectory of Persianate manuscript production resulting in intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars.