The theme of this year’s conference is “Memory.” A good theme, I think. Yet it occurred to me not long ago that when I proposed this year’s theme, I may have been engaging in wishful thinking. That was back in the summer of 2024, when I fervently hoped the tides of illiberal populism were in the rearview mirror, at least in the United States. After several years of conference themes focusing on decolonization, liberation, precarity, and anxiety, I suppose I was hoping—perhaps unconsciously–that these tumultuous times would soon be but a memory.
Of course, I was wrong, for many reasons. The ongoing assault on Ukraine and the strength of illiberal movements throughout the world should have warned me that our tribulations were far from over. And then came the election of November 2024. Since the advent of the second Trump administration, as you all know, things have gotten worse—much worse—for our field, for higher education, and for democracy in the United States. This has been a uniquely challenging year, in which we, as scholars, have found ourselves under attack from within as well as from abroad. The administration’s hostility to foreign scholars and conflicts with our allies have led our international members to question whether they can or should travel to the United States for our convention. Institutions and programs whose presence we have taken for granted for decades are vanishing or on life support. The government is withholding funding for scientific research in order to force ideological compliance on universities. Federal funding for foreign language study and overseas research is being eliminated or cut to the bone. On top of all this, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in June 2025 declared ASEEES an “undesirable organization.” Responding to all of these assaults on academic freedom, research funding, and international scholars has kept the ASEEES staff and leadership busy all year.
Memory wars are a crucial aspect of the current political polarization, globally as well as domestically.
So perhaps memory was not the most timely theme for this year’s convention. Nevertheless, it has been a stimulating theme, and there have been many terrific panels and discussions of memory at this year’s conference. Memory wars are a crucial aspect of the current political polarization, globally as well as domestically. In the region we study, attempts to control the way history is remembered are crucial to authoritarian regimes and their nationalist claims. This is most evident in the egregious ways Putin has sought to erase Ukrainian identity and history. In the United States, we see conflicts over memory in the attacks on museum exhibits, the teaching of history, even at national parks. Over the summer I visited Manzanar, a World War II-era Japanese internment camp in California. There I spotted a new sign—apparently mandatory now at all national historic sites and museums—urging visitors to contact a federal complaint hotline if they saw anything at the site that was “negative about either past or living Americans.” Even the park rangers working there rolled their eyes at the absurdity of a memorial at a concentration camp permitted to say only positive things about American greatness. I have no regrets about choosing the theme of memory. But if I were to choose a theme today, it would be something different, something a bit more forward-looking: perhaps “hope.” Because in this moment, when a relentless illiberal tide is threatening our universities, our research, and our academic freedom, we need to find a way to keep hope alive.
This is not the first time it has seemed that the future of our field was in jeopardy. I have looked back at past presidential addresses and found that quite a few of them sounded the alarm about challenges facing our field. In 2014, ASEEES president Steve Hanson lamented the cuts in Title VI and Title VIII funding that were then taking place, even as rising international conflict underscored the need for regional expertise and languages. Padraic Kenney bemoaned the alarming transnational spread of right-wing populism in his 2016 address, saying: “This may be the most uncertain, fragile moment in the history of our profession.” Joan Neuberger called her year, 2022, “a devastating year for people in our region and for members of our association who care about the region,” referring, of course, to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I don’t want to compete with my predecessors over who has had the most challenging presidential year. I will say, though, that I’ve never before felt, as I do now, that the people, institutions, and principles I value most are under assault from our own federal government, that there is not just indifference but active hostility from powerful forces toward scholars and the work we do. It’s possible our concerns about academic freedom and democracy will seem overblown a couple of years from now, and that people reading my speech in an archived issue of NewsNet will find my fears exaggerated. It’s also possible that things could get much, much worse. We just don’t know.
The unprecedented events of the past year have made me realize that I have been guilty of unpardonable smugness in the past. Like many educated, white, middle-class Americans, I have taken for granted the relative stability, peace, and predictability in which my generation has lived. I’m embarrassed to admit that I accepted this as the norm, implicitly believing that revolutions, political repression, democratic collapse, and regime change are things that afflict people in other times and places. As a historian, I should have known better. It turns out I held an unwarranted, though perhaps not even entirely conscious, belief in the myth of American exceptionalism. It’s possible that I am unusually naïve, but I don’t think I am the only person who was in denial about just how fragile our democratic institutions and norms would prove to be. By now we all know that we are not exempt from the historical forces buffeting the rest of the world. Things we studied “elsewhere” as scholars are now happening here: institutional breakdown and the rise of charismatic leaders and demagogues. Right-wing populism and xenophobic nationalism. Crackdowns on dissent and attacks on civil and political rights. Troops in our cities. Masked men dragging people into unmarked cars. I knew that things were getting bad when friends in Turkmenistan started sending me WhatsApp messages expressing concern about the state of democracy in the United States!
This unpardonable smugness, I am sorry to say, also made its way into my own work. A couple of years ago, I published a book on interethnic marriage in Soviet Central Asia. Like many books, this one took a long time, and between the time when I first conceived of the project and when I finally finished it, the context had changed completely. When I started my research, we had a biracial president in the White House and I believed that this country had passed a milestone on the road to greater racial justice and acceptance. The election of Barack Obama meant a lot to my family, since we are a mixed-race family. The ethnic complexity of my own family may well be part of the reason I was attracted to the topic of intermarriage in the first place. My background is European-American, my husband is Nigerian and African-American, and we have an adopted son who is of African-American, Jamaican, and South Asian ancestry. My brother is married to a Korean-American woman and has a mixed-race son. Within our extended family there are also people of Japanese and South African heritage. Such families are common in the United States today, but this is a relatively recent development; interracial marriage was illegal in many states until the Supreme Court struck down such bans in 1967. When my father dated a Chinese woman in early 1940s San Francisco, both sets of parents intervened to end a relationship that had no future. Because of the fraught history surrounding intermarriage in my own country, I was intrigued by the fact that the Soviet Union encouraged intermarriage as a way of bridging ethnic divisions and creating a “Soviet people.” The United States, by contrast, featured not just legal bans on intermarriage but reputable sociologists claiming that racially mixed people were neurotic and socially maladjusted.
In my book’s conclusion, I noted that many of the post-Soviet successor states had abandoned the Soviet emphasis on ethnic equality and harmony in favor of an exclusivist nationalism. I wrote this in late 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing and I still believed that the United States was committed to promoting racial justice. I was drawing an implicit contrast between the nationalist and xenophobic post-Soviet countries and my own country, now finally making progress toward justice and equality. Needless to say, this contrast was totally off base. Since then, we in the United States have faced attacks on diversity and equity, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, immigrants, the mainstreaming of an extremely ugly form of white nationalism, and all in all a massive backlash against all the gains of the last few decades. When I wrote at the end of my book that progress is never guaranteed and change is not linear, I was referring to the rise of racism, xenophobic nationalism and anti-feminism in the countries of the former Soviet Union. But I might just as well have been speaking about our own society, where the same tendencies were brewing.
Since the theme of this presidential speech seems to be “the many ways in which Adrienne Edgar has been wrong,” let me just add one more example to the list. Among the first people I interviewed for my book on ethnic intermarriage in Soviet Central Asia was a middle-aged resident of Kazakhstan whom I will call “Irina,” child of a Muslim father from the North Caucasus and a Russian mother. After chatting amiably for an hour about her own experiences growing up in a mixed family, I asked how she felt about mixed marriages for her own children. In response, she said, “Oh, any nationality is fine as long as it’s not an African. That’s the one kind of mixed marriage I could never accept.” Taken aback, I blurted out, “My husband is an African!” My respondent was mortified, and needless to say, the interview turned very awkward after that and soon ended. This experience left me thinking about my own role as a scholar and how much of my own background and experiences it is appropriate to reveal in the interview process. Prior to starting the oral history part of my research, I had assumed that sharing my own experience with mixed marriage would help to build rapport with my respondents. Irina’s response showed me that things were not that simple.
Many families I met in Kazakhstan were ethnically complex, due to several successive generations of Soviet-era mixing. Yet as I learned in my interview with Irina, sharing my own history did not necessarily create a connection with them. People of African descent were considered “beyond the pale” by many people in the former Soviet Union, occupying the bottom of a racial hierarchy in which Russians and other Europeans were at the top. I had encountered such views of Africans in Russia—for example, on several occasions people had expressed surprise upon hearing that my husband is a mathematician, saying they thought Black people were good at sports and music but not at “things like mathematics” (in other words, things requiring intelligence). I was surprised to find such views in Kazakhstan as well, imagining that a people colonized and dominated by Russia would be more resistant to stereotyping of marginalized groups elsewhere. Of course, I should not have been so surprised. The Russian-speaking Kazakh intelligentsia had been steeped in the same intellectual trends and environment as the ethnically Russian intelligentsia in the late Soviet era. This included the rise of racialized thinking among intellectuals as well as the broader population.
The study of race is relatively new in Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies, but there has been a recent surge of interest in the topic among scholars of the region. Looking at Soviet history in particular, it is clear that Western historians for many years accepted at face value Soviet claims about the absence of race and racism in the USSR. Scholars have recently begun looking more seriously at the extent to which race has mattered in Russia and the Soviet Union. They have argued that nationality in the USSR, initially viewed by the Bolsheviks as an exclusively cultural and historical phenomenon, gradually came to be seen as something genetically determined and immutable. Historians now argue that racial categories were very much present in the Soviet Union, even if the word “race” was rarely if ever used. Yet much more research remains to be done on this, especially in my own field of Central Asian studies. Race is an essential category of difference and hierarchy in colonial and multiethnic settings, and Central Asia was both very ethnically diverse and the most obviously “colonized” part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Moreover, indigenous Central Asians were often phenotypically distinct from ethnic Russians and therefore especially susceptible to being racialized.
Many of you are no doubt aware that in addition to the memory theme, this year’s convention features a “Spotlight on Central Asia.” Central Asian studies has long been a somewhat marginal field within ASEEES. A small number of us who work on Central Asia have persisted in coming to ASEEES conventions, year after year, giving papers to three or four of our closest colleagues at panels that always seemed to be scheduled for Sunday at 8 a.m. Why have we kept coming? Partly because many of us were trained within Russian or Soviet studies programs, since Central Asia is rarely offered as a stand-alone field. But it was also because we felt that our field had something significant to contribute to the study of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and Eurasia more broadly. We wanted to have conversations with scholars in the broader field, not just with other Central Asianists.
In the last few years, we have seen steady growth and increased recognition of Central Asia as a field in its own right. At the same time, Central Asian studies has made major contributions to the study of Russian and Soviet history (see, for example, the contributions of Adeeb Khalid, Scott C. Levi, Nari Shelekpayev, Sarah Cameron, and Adrienne Edgar to the recent forum in the Winter 2025 issue of Kritika). For example, research on collectivization in Central Asia has revised notions about the extent and nature of resistance to the Stalinist transformation of the countryside. Studies of the horrific famine in Kazakhstan in the 1930s have broadened our understanding of hunger and state policy under Stalinism. Studies of migration in Central Asia, where nomads crossed supposedly closed borders well into the Soviet era, offer a different view from research conducted in the Soviet West. Today, there is widespread recognition that what happened in Central Asia is not marginal to the Russian/Soviet field, but essential to understanding the nature of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This recognition was beginning to dawn well before the most recent calls to decenter and decolonize our field. Panels on Central Asia, though few and far between, had begun to attract larger audiences in recent years. Then the full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022 led to widespread calls for a decentering of Russia in the Slavic and Eurasian field, which has given a further boost to the study of our region. Since 2022, scholars in a variety of disciplines have turned their gaze southward, toward Central Asia and the Caucasus, partly out of necessity, as Russia has become inaccessible to researchers, and partly out of conviction. While it is possible that some of these newly minted Central Asianists will view the region as a second-rate, temporary substitute for Russia, as Sarah Cameron warned in a recent Kritika article, others will no doubt gain a new appreciation for the region’s history and culture. And with Russia inaccessible to western scholars for the foreseeable future, the emphasis on the southern regions of Eurasia is not likely to end anytime soon. This year, with the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference taking place here in Washington the day before our own, and with the ASEEES “Spotlight on Central Asia,” we have more Central Asianists in attendance than ever before.
There is one final thing I’d like to mention this evening, and this brings me back to the not so cheery topic with which I began my talk—the assault on higher education and research. When I became president in January, our organization almost immediately had to respond to a slew of federal actions that threatened our field. We were signing a lot of letters of support and protest. Yet this flurry of activity left me with a feeling of futility, a conviction that none of it would really have any impact in the face of a hostile government trying to bulldoze us out of existence. I was particularly outraged by the defunding of grants and fellowships already awarded to students and scholars—often with virtually no notice, and in some cases in the middle of the funding period. As president of ASEEES, I wanted our organization to do something meaningful that would make a real difference to people in our field. And it seemed to me that the one thing we could do that would have immediate and concrete effects would be to raise money to fill the gaps created by funding cuts, particularly for our graduate students.
So earlier this year we launched the Next Generation Emergency Research Fund campaign, intended to raise enough money to fund a number of full-year dissertation research fellowships and short-term dissertation grants, on top of those ASEEES already gives out each year. We would raise money primarily from established scholars who can afford to give, in order to help those who are just starting out in the field. I see this as a kind of self-help, when outside sources of assistance are drying up, and also as a form of transgenerational solidarity. And I am thrilled to report that the results so far have been beyond our wildest dreams. An incredible group of scholars has joined me on the campaign leadership committee, donating generously themselves and pledging to solicit donations from their friends and colleagues. Many of those the committee members have approached have also donated with amazing generosity. Thank you, to all of you! This, perhaps more than anything else this year, has given me hope.
I have gained a new appreciation for the sources of community and friendship that provide moral, intellectual, and emotional support at a frightening time.
The past year has been one of shattered illusions for many of us. But it has also been a year in which I, at least, have gained a new appreciation for the sources of community and friendship that provide moral, intellectual, and emotional support at a frightening time. ASEEES, an organization to which I have belonged for three decades, is one such source of community for me, as it probably is for you. We can’t stop all the terrible things happening around us, most of which are driven by powerful historical forces beyond our control. But we can come together, take a stand and take some form of action—however small and local—with colleagues and friends in support of our shared values. We can do this while hoping, as I still do, that these troubled times will someday be little more than a bad memory.
