On October 22 please join us for a seminar with Masha Kirasirova from NYU Abu Dhabi titled "My Enemy’s Enemy: Consequences of the CIA Operation Against Abdulqasim Lahuti, 1953-1954." The event is part of the Tamiment Library Center for the United States and the Cold War seminar series and co-sponsored by the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. The seminar series is particularly interested in projects that connect foreign policy to domestic policies as they relate to the U.S. response to revolutionary nationalism, repression, resistance, internal security, labor relations, civil rights, civil liberties, race, class, and gender. The seminars, which are open to everyone, are meant for research fellows and invited guests to present their work in progress.
Kirasirova is a Center for the United States and the Cold War Fellow and holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from New York University. She 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; 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).
Download the Fall 2015 Seminar Schedule
This event is part of the Tamiment Library Center for the United States and the Cold War seminar series. The seminar is co-sponsored by the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia
