Masha Kirasirova, March 27
The Russian History Seminar will hold its next meeting of the 2014-2015 academic year on Friday, March 27, 5:00pm-6:15pm in ICC 662 on the Georgetown University campus. Masha Kirasirova (NYU Abu Dhabi) will present her paper, “’The East’ as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology, Stalinist Civilization, and Comintern Administration.”
Masha Kirasirova is Assistant Professor of History at NYU Abu Dhabi. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Middle East Studies from New York University.
Masha Kirasirova is a historian of exchanges between the Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East. Her work approaches modern Middle Eastern history from a “Second World” perspective. It brings together several hitherto separate scholarly domains: Soviet nationalities policy with regard to the USSR’s Muslim populations; the social and cultural history of Stalinism in shaping the experience of Arab communists in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s; cultural exchange with non-communist Arab leftist intellectuals during the Cold War; and the impacts of these exchanges on artistic, bureaucratic, and political practices inside the USSR and on those exported to Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt.
Kirasirova is the author of “Sons of Muslims in Moscow: Soviet Central Asian Mediators to the Foreign East, 1955–1962,” Ab Imperio 4 (2011); and “Orients Compared: US and Soviet Imaginaries of the Modern Middle East,” in Michael Kemper and Artemy Kalinovsky, eds., Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies in the Cold War Era (Routledge, 2014). She is also co-editing a volume on Soviet Orientalism with Michael Kemper and Vladimir Bobrovnikov.
Kirasirova’s work has been supported by university-wide, competitive research fellowships at NYU including the Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (2013), the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship (2012), the GSAS Torch Prize Fellowship (2010), the GSAS Predoctoral Summer Fellowship (2010), and the Friends of History Fellowship (2010). She has also received a Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) Visiting Research Fellowship (2013), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Eurasia Dissertation Development Award (2012), the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2012), the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2011), the IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) Fellowship (2010), a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) to study Persian in Tajikistan (2011), and two Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to study Arabic in Syria (2009 and 2008).