Gulnar is a native of Kazakhstan, one of the republics of the former Soviet Union, and now an independent Central Asian state. Her background spurred her desire to explore Kazakhstan’s and the region’s social and intellectual history in a more sophisticated way, free from ideological and other cliches. The desire was reinforced by the fall of the Soviet Union which opened new perspectives on exploring the region’s history, by removing political dogmas and providing access to the still-unknown and less-known archival and other materials. In addition, historians on both sides of the iron curtain could become better acquainted with the research of their colleagues by traveling to each other’s countries and residing there for a prolonged period.  

Gulnar took advantage of the changed situation by applying for and receiving several scholarships, including the DAAD scholarship, the Thyssen fellowship, the American Councils (ACTR/ACCELS) grant, the Fulbright Fellowship, and the Pepsico travel fellowship grant. These scholarships enabled her to do research in the central and regional archives and libraries of France, Germany, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Her work culminated in defending two Ph.D. dissertations at the Eötvös-Loránd University in Budapest and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany) and the subsequent publication of three books.

Gulnar’s most recently published two books Russian Practices of Governance in Eurasia. Frontier Power Politics, Sixteenth Century to Nineteenth Century (2020) and Under the Tsar’s Exalted Arm… Russian Technologies of Power in the Formative Period of the Rise of the Russian Empire (2022) offer a new approach to exploring the formative period of the rise of the Russian Empire in the period from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among other things, the approach challenges the well-established paradigm of conquest and subjugation strongly associated with the spread of Russian imperial rule over the vast Eurasian terrain. At the same time, it casts doubt on the concept of voluntary joining of non-Russian populations with Russians that was promoted by Soviet historians.

Based on her research, Gulnar also developed several courses featuring nomads of the Eurasian steppes, imperial Russia, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Central Asia, which she taught at Columbia University in the City of New York (2004-2020), the Kazakh National University of Al Farabi, and the International University of Information Technologies in Almaty (Kazakhstan) (2020-present).

Currently, Gulnar has been working on a book that explores new venues for better conceptualizing imperial technologies that enabled the rise and operation of empires in Eurasia and elsewhere in the early modern and modern times.     

You can connect with Gulnar via email: nargul129@gmail.com, as well as by visiting her social media sites: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.