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Filling the Hole in Global Studies: The UCLA Program on Central Asia

In a period in which scholars from all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences are paying increased attention to Eurasian and global interactions-as well as a period of unprecedented American political involvement in the region, the Asia Institute's Program on Central Asia, launched in the spring of 2008 as the Central Asia Initiative, aims to cultivate a space for the social, cultural, religious and economic dimensions of Central Asian studies. With support from the UCLA International Institute and in collaboration with the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, the G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Center for India and South Asia, the Program looks beyond the old Silk Road paradigm and seeks to bring these gaps and opportunities together by facilitating the introduction of Central Asia into comparative and connective studies, while at the same time promoting the study of Central Asia as a region with properly autonomous histories in its own right that also connect outwards to the wider world.

Now in its third year, the Program on Central Asia introduces a joint lecture series with the Center for the Study of Religion on Religions of the Silk Road: Transformation and Transmission in the Heart of Asia

Program on Central Asia Steering Committee

Nile Green
Professor, Department of History; Director, Program on Central Asia

Munir Beken
Assistant Professor, Ethnomusicology

Nancy Levine
Professor, Department of Anthropology

Hannah Reiss
Graduate Student, Anthropology

Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Professor, Department of History

Ronald Vroon
Professor and Chair, Slavic Languages & Literatures

R. Bin Wong
Professor, History; Director of the Asia Institute