In 2018, the Organization for the Advancement of Studies of Inner Eurasian Societies (OASIES), the graduate student organization, celebrated its tenth anniversary. It was founded by Owen Miller, Darren Byler, and Anthony Shin, who had taken the classes that I taught at that time at Columbia University. When the students suggested the idea, it sounded as welcoming and reasonable as unexpected news to me. They argued that the university covered the study of such important Asian regions as East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Yet, the Central Asian region, despite its name reflecting not only its geographical location but also the region’s contribution to the Asian and world cultures had still been missing from Columbia’s map of area studies. Owen, Darren, and Anthony viewed the proposed organization as a step toward putting the region on that map, by highlighting its unique history and culture. Anthony came up with the name of the organization, which was approved by the rest of us. With time, the range of OASIES activities came to feature a few events, including annual student conferences, faculty panels, brown bag lectures, and the screening of Central Asian films. The OASIES activists chose topics for all these events and decided whom they should invite. All these events were enabled through the generous and invariable support mainly of the university’s Harriman Institute which provided funds, space, and logistics.

Although the founders of OASIES put their finger on the perplexed situation with Central Asian Studies at Columbia, it would be erroneous to maintain that the region completely escaped the university’s attention. The name of Professor Edward Allworth, the renowned historian, who promoted Central Asian Studies not only at Columbia but also in Western academia, should be mentioned in the first place. Apart from founding the Program on Soviet Nationality Problems (1970) and the Center for Central Asian Studies (1984), Professor Allworth established the Department of Middle East Languages and Cultures (1984) at Columbia to focus on the study of contemporary Central Asia.  However, after his retirement in 1988, the integrity of the field as deserving of a separate institution within Columbia’s framework of institutions went lost.  Subsequently, the study of Central Asian regions, depending on their geographical locations, became divided among Columbia’s various institutions and departments. For example, the study of Mongolia and Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) which constitute the heart of Central Asia was placed under the East Asian Institute, while the northern provinces of Afghanistan and Iran, which had enormously contributed to the formation of Central Asian medieval culture, became integrated into the curricula of the Middle Eastern Institute, while the newly independent Central Asian states of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, by having constituted parts of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union came to comprise part of the regional studies that have been running by the Harriman Institute. Following the institute’s profile, the Central Asian program has given priority to studying the five states’ contemporary political issues. It was therefore natural that the very first OASIES event, the faculty panel, held in April of 2008 under the title Lacunae: Area Studies and the Inner Asian Space discussed the contemporary condition of area studies in the American academia. The panel, which I was honored to moderate, featured the leading historians in the field of Russian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Studies, including Professors Jane Burbank (NYU), Richard Bulliet (Columbia University), Charles Armstrong (Columbia University), and David Ludden (NYU).

This year, we held three other panels on this very subject that came to form the OASIES’ special series of Forgotten Communities of Inner Eurasia. The first of them, Power, Knowledge, and Kurdistan, was organized by Owen Miller and Kemal Suleimani to discuss the history, culture, and current political situation of the Kurdish people. The organizers invited the leading experts in the field of Kurdish studies, Professor Janet Klein among them, who shared their expertise with their audience. Apart from addressing the Kurds’ controversial political situation, the panelists strove to provide a broader historical and cultural picture to avoid capitalizing on merely political problems. The audience was represented, among others, by the Kurdish diaspora of New York, who struck me not only with their numbers but also their sense of solidarity and support, in addition to the generous and very delicious meals, they had offered. My impression was further reinforced by the rain that was coming down in torrents throughout that day and was accompanied by strong gusting winds.

Like the Kurdish panel, Pax Mongolica. Area Studies and the Mongol Legacy. An Informal Discussion with Morris Rossabi and Scholars of Mongol Studies, the second panel in the series, proved a remarkable success with both students and folks from the broader metropolitan area. Dedicated to discussing the current condition of Mongol Studies in American academia, the panel featured the leading American experts in the field of Mongol studies, including Nicola di Cosmo (Princeton University), Ladan Akbaria (Brooklyn Museum of Art) and Peter Golden (Rutgers University). The organizers of the third panel were China, Central Asia, and the Uyghurs. Exploring Challenges of Cultural Hybridity (An Informal Discussion with Scholars of Uyghur Studies) Darren Byler and other students dedicated it to discussing yet another forgotten community, the Uyghurs of the autonomous region of Xinjiang in China. Like the previous two panels, the last panel turned out a remarkable event, not only due to the number of its audience but also the delicious homemade ethnic food. The big rooms of the International Affairs Building that the organizers had hired for holding all three panels proved in the end not spacious enough to accommodate all those who desired to participate. People from the audience were standing by the walls and sitting between the aisles on additional chairs, which they had brought from other classrooms. No doubt that the delicious Central Asian and other foods constituted an important part of the successful outcomes of these and other OASIES events, including the screening of Central Asian movies. Although not all screened movies had English subtitles, thanks to featuring the introduction and Q&A sections, the movies usually evoked lively interest on the part of both Columbia’s community and the public.

With time, the organization established its branches at the universities of New York and Princeton. We held one of our annual graduate conferences at Princeton in 2012, while the Kevorkian Center of NYU hosted another conference in 2015. Both conferences were attended by sizable audiences, representing along with students, denizens of the greater New Jersey and New York areas. This should come as no surprise considering that papers presented at these and other OASIES conferences were, as a rule, marked by a high level of academic performance.

Today the OASIES founders and activists have been pursuing remarkable careers. Elizabeth E. Kalynych works for the US Department of Justice. After defending his Ph.D. in Ottoman history at Columbia University, Owen Miller has been teaching in the capacity of Assistant Professor at one of Turkey’s well-known educational centers, the University of Bilkent. Darren Byler defended his Ph.D. at the University of Washington on the topic of his academic passion, Xinxiang, the eastern part of Turkestan, and part of contemporary China. He has been teaching as an Associate Professor of History at the University of Vancouver (Canada). In the meantime, he authored three books featuring his research interests. The third founder of OASIES, Anthony Shin, was accepted for a Ph.D. program at the Department of History of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Christopher Edling, in turn, spent several years in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan as a Fulbright scholar, where he continued to investigate the practice of bride kidnapping, which had been the topic of his OASIES presentation. As a full-time faculty member, he has been teaching creative writing at NYU and writing his book on forced marriages in Central Asia and beyond.

Thus, the history of OASIES proves that the legacy of Professor Edward Allworth continues to endure. This legacy demonstrated that the interest in exploring the Central Asian region in more depth that would exceed the classroom had exponentially increased over the more than thirty-year period after his retirement.  A dramatic change in the political landscape that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 reinvigorated this interest. Free travel and new business opportunities enhanced the interest of the international community in exploring the region’s ancient history and cultures, which entailed, among other things, studying Central Asian languages. The OASIES set itself the task of addressing this interest, by bringing the region closer to its American audiences, who came to represent people from all walks of life.

No doubt that the new political situation facilitated meeting the task but also presented its activists with new challenges. As mentioned earlier, the most formidable of these challenges related to the absence of an institutional structure that would have adopted an integrated approach to exploring the region in terms of its geography, history, and culture. Professor Allworth’s attempts to establish such a framework in the 1980s, unfortunately, did not find continuation, despite the growing interest in studying the region. The absence of such a framework thwarted the OASIES initiative itself in the end.  Due to the fluidity of its membership, the organization was compelled to suspend its operation in 2018, the year when the entire OASIES Board graduated from Columbia. The repeated attempts to relaunch the organization in the following years invariably stumbled upon the lack of experience and the disrupted link of continuity embodied in the earlier generations.

Despite the challenges, the legacies of Professor Edward Allworth and OASIES should encourage future generations of Columbia and students at other universities, who are interested in exploring Central Asia, to invest in their endeavors. The permanently changing post-Soviet political landscape has opened new opportunities for exploring Central Asia both on the spot and from afar.  These opportunities therefore can open new venues for reconceptualizing Central Asia studies at Columbia and elsewhere in the post-Soviet era, followed by its better integration into the university’s framework of institutions as an independent field of study. As a former member of the organization’s Board, I felt like I had to voice this concern, which my OASIES affiliates share with me, and pass it on to generations to come.