Ali F. Igmen

Ali İğmen is Professor of Central Asian History, and the Director of the Oral History Program at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). He served as the President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2018 (2017-2020 Executive board). His first book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan is published by the Central Asia in Context Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press in July 2012, which was shortlisted for the best book award by the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2013. His second book, coedited with Ananda Breed and Eva-Marie Dubuisson, Creating Culture in (Post)Socialist Central Asia is published by Palgrave Macmillan Press in November 2020. His most recent article “Between Empire and the Nation-State, between Humanism and Communism: Nazim Hikmet’s Noble Struggle with Modernity” appeared in The Arc of Revolution, Socialist Subjectivity in Transnational Perspective, a volume in the edited compilation, Choi Chatterjee, editor, Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–1922: The Centenary Reappraisal, Slavica Press, 2019. His other work include “Four Daughters of Tököldösh: Kyrgyz Actresses Define Soviet Modernity” appeared in 2012 (32/1) in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME). His book chapter “Kyrgyz Houses of Culture, 1920s and 1930s” appeared in Reconstructing the Soviet and Eastern European Houses House of Culture, (Habeck and Donahoe, editors,) by Berghahn Press in 2011. He received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004, and as a post-doctorate visiting scholar, taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He also taught classes in Kyrgyz National University in Bishkek, Osh State University in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. A significant number of awards helped İğmen support his research on Kyrgyzstan such as Fulbright-Hays, SSRC and FLAS. Most recently, he received the university-wide Early Career Excellence Award from CSULB in 2011. His current work is a comparative project on the often conflicting state-initiated and society-supported “hero-making” processes during the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Central Asia and Turkey.